[Python-Dev] Bug in the DELETE statement in sqlite3 module

[Paul Moore]

On 15 June 2016 at 07:40, ninostephen mathew <ninosm12 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Respected Developer(s),
> while writing a database module for one of my applications in python I
> encountered something interesting. I had a username and password field in my
> table and only one entry which was  "Admin" and "password". While debugging
> I purposefully deleted that record. Then I ran the same statement again. To
> my surprise, it got execute. Then I ran the statement to delete the user
> "admin" (lowercase 'a') which does not exist in the table. Surprisingly
> again is got executed even though the table was empty. What I expected was
> an error popping up. But nothing happened.  I hope this error gets fixed
> soon. The code snippet is given below.
>
> self.cursor.execute(''' DELETE FROM Users WHERE username =
> ?''',(self.username,))

First of all, this list is for the discussions about the development
of Python itself, not for developing applications with Python. You
should probably be posting to python-list instead.

Having said that, this is how SQL works - a DELETE statement selects
all records matching the WHERE clause and deletes them. If the WHERE
clause doesn't match anything, nothing gets deleted. So your code is
working exactly as I would expect.

Paul