MySQL: Get column name or alias from query

Question

I\'m not asking for the SHOW COLUMNS command.

I want to create an application that works similarly to heidisql, where you can specify an SQL query and w

Answer 1

You could also use MySQLdb.cursors.DictCursor. This turns your result set into a python list of python dictionaries, although it uses a special cursor, thus technically less portable than the accepted answer. Not sure about speed. Here's the edited original code that uses this.

#!/usr/bin/python -u

import MySQLdb
import MySQLdb.cursors

#===================================================================
# connect to mysql
#===================================================================

try:
    db = MySQLdb.connect(host='myhost', user='myuser', passwd='mypass', db='mydb', cursorclass=MySQLdb.cursors.DictCursor)
except MySQLdb.Error, e:
    print 'Error %d: %s' % (e.args[0], e.args[1])
    sys.exit(1)

#===================================================================
# query select from table
#===================================================================

cursor = db.cursor()

sql = 'SELECT ext, SUM(size) AS totalsize, COUNT(*) AS filecount FROM fileindex GROUP BY ext ORDER BY totalsize DESC;'

cursor.execute(sql)
all_rows = cursor.fetchall()

print len(all_rows) # How many rows are returned.
for row in all_rows: # While loops always make me shudder!
    print '%s %s %s\n' % (row['ext'], row['totalsize'], row['filecount'])

cursor.close()
db.close()  

Standard dictionary functions apply, for example, len(row[0]) to count the number of columns for the first row, list(row[0]) for a list of column names (for the first row), etc. Hope this helps!