Get a list of field values from Python's sqlite3, not tuples representing rows

Question

It\'s annoying how Python\'s sqlite3 module always returns a list of tuples! When I am querying a single column, I would prefer to get a plain list.

e.g. when I exec

Answer 1

account for the case where cursor.fetchall() returns an empty list:

try:
    columnlist = list(zip(*cursor.fetchall())[COLUMN_INDEX])
except IndexError:
    columnlist = []