Question

It is possible export sqlite3 table to csv or xls format? I’m using python 2.7 and sqlite3.

Answer 1

I knocked this very basic script together using a slightly modified example class from the docs; it simply exports an entire table to a CSV file:

import sqlite3
import csv, codecs, cStringIO

class UnicodeWriter:
    """
    A CSV writer which will write rows to CSV file "f", 
    which is encoded in the given encoding.
    """

    def __init__(self, f, dialect=csv.excel, encoding="utf-8", **kwds):
        # Redirect output to a queue
        self.queue = cStringIO.StringIO()
        self.writer = csv.writer(self.queue, dialect=dialect, **kwds)
        self.stream = f
        self.encoder = codecs.getincrementalencoder(encoding)()

    def writerow(self, row):
        self.writer.writerow([unicode(s).encode("utf-8") for s in row])
        # Fetch UTF-8 output from the queue ...
        data = self.queue.getvalue()
        data = data.decode("utf-8")
        # ... and reencode it into the target encoding
        data = self.encoder.encode(data)
        # write to the target stream
        self.stream.write(data)
        # empty queue
        self.queue.truncate(0)

    def writerows(self, rows):
        for row in rows:
            self.writerow(row)

conn = sqlite3.connect('yourdb.sqlite')

c = conn.cursor()
c.execute('select * from yourtable')

writer = UnicodeWriter(open("export.csv", "wb"))

writer.writerows(c)

Hope this helps!

Edit: If you want headers in the CSV, the quick way is to manually add another row before you write the data from the database, e.g:

# Select whichever rows you want in whatever order you like
c.execute('select id, forename, surname, email from contacts')

writer = UnicodeWriter(open("export.csv", "wb"))

# Make sure the list of column headers you pass in are in the same order as your SELECT
writer.writerow(["ID", "Forename", "Surname", "Email"])
writer.writerows(c)

Edit 2: To output pipe-separated columns, register a custom CSV dialect and pass that into the writer, like so:

csv.register_dialect('pipeseparated', delimiter = '|')

writer = UnicodeWriter(open("export.csv", "wb"), dialect='pipeseparated')

Here’s a list of the various formatting parameters you can use with a custom dialect.