How to export sqlite to CSV in Python without being formatted as a list?

Question

Here is what I currently have:

conn = sqlite3.connect(dbfile)
conn.text_factory = str ## my current (failed) attempt to resolve this
cur = conn.cursor()
data = cur.execute("SELECT * FROM mytable")

f = open('output.csv', 'w')
print >> f, "Column1, Column2, Column3, Etc."
for row in data:
  print >> f, row
f.close()

It creates a CSV file with output that looks like this:

Column1, Column2, Column3, Etc.
(1, u'2011-05-05 23:42:29',298776684,1448052234,463564768,-1130996322, None, u'2011-05-06 04:44:41')

I don't want the rows to be in parentheses nor have quotes nor the 'u' before strings. How do I get it to write the rows to csv without all of this? Thanks,

Answer 1

What you're currently doing is printing out the python string representation of a tuple, i.e. the return value of str(row). That includes the quotes and 'u's and parentheses and so on.

Instead, you want the data formatted properly for a CSV file. Well, try the csv module. It knows how to format things for CSV files, unsurprisingly enough.

with open('output.csv', 'wb') as f:
    writer = csv.writer(f)
    writer.writerow(['Column 1', 'Column 2', ...])
    writer.writerows(data)

Answer 2

Converting an sqlite database table to csv file can also be done directly using sqlite3 tools:

>sqlite3 c:/sqlite/chinook.db
sqlite> .headers on
sqlite> .mode csv
sqlite> .output data.csv
sqlite> SELECT customerid,
   ...>        firstname,
   ...>        lastname,
   ...>        company
   ...>   FROM customers;
sqlite> .quit

The above sqlite3 commands will will create a csv file called data.csv in your current directory (of course this file can be named whatever you choose). More details are available here: http://www.sqlitetutorial.net/sqlite-export-csv/