Question

This string:

"CREATE USER %s PASSWORD %s", (user, pw)

always gets expanded to:

CREATE USER E'someuser' PASSWORD E'somepassword'

Can anyone tell me why?

Edit:
The expanded string above is the string my database gives me back in the error message. I’m using psycopg2 to access my postgres database. The real code looks like this:

conn=psycopg2.connect(user=adminuser, password=adminpass, host=host)
cur = conn.cursor()

#user and pw are simple standard python strings the function gets as parameter
cur.execute("CREATE USER %s PASSWORD %s", (user, pw))
conn.commit()

Answer 1

Not only the E but the quotes appear to come from whatever type user and pw have. %s simply does what str() does, which may fall back to repr(), both of which have corresponding methods __str__ and __repr__. Also, that isn’t the code that generates your result (I’d assumed there was a %, but now see only a comma). Please expand your question with actual code, types and values.

Addendum: Considering that it looks like SQL, I’d hazard a guess that you’re seeing escape string constants, likely properly generated by your database interface module or library.