Question

My table bank has three columns: uid, nick, and balance.

I can insert new row perfectly fine, however it would be easy for duplicates of the nick to appear since the uid auto increments, making each row unique. However I don’t want that, I only one want one row for each nick.

    target = input.group(2)

    cursor.execute ("INSERT INTO bank (nick, balance) VALUES('" + db.escape_string(target.lower()) + "', 5)")
    db.commit()

    bot.say('An account for ' + target + ' has been created.')

That is my code so far, however I am unsure in how I would create a SELECT query and then check if the nick already exists in the table before inserting a new row.

Answer 1

I would adopt a different approach. I would add a unique constraint at DB-level on the nick column:

ALTER TABLE bank ADD UNIQUE (nick);

Within your Python code, then put a try and except to handle the unique constraint violated exception appropriately.