Reading DBF files with pyodbc

Question

In a project, I need to extract data from a Visual FoxPro database, which is stored in dbf files, y have a data directory with 539 files I need to take into account, each fi

Answer 1

I would use my own dbf package and the code would go something like this:

import dbf
from glob import glob

for dbf_file in glob(r'p:\data\*.dbf'):
    with dbf.Table(dbf_file) as table:
        for record in table:
            do_something_with(record)

A table is list-like, and iteration through it returns records. A record is list-, dict-, and obj-like, and iteration returns the values; besides iteration through the record, individual fields can be accessed either by offset (record[0] for the first field), by field-name using dict-like access (record['some_field']), or by field-name using obj.attr-like access (record.some_field).

If you just wanted to dump the contents of each dbf file into a csv file you could do:

for dbf_file in glob(r'p:\data\*.dbf'):
    with dbf.Table(dbf_file) as table:
        dbf.export(table, dbf_file)