choose from a list

[mensanator at aol.com]

On Nov 1, 11:54 am, barronmo <barro... at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is really remarkable.  My previous experience with programming
> was in VB for Applications; doing the same thing seemed much more
> complicated.  This little function is only about 15 lines of code and
> it forms the basis for my entire application.  With a few simple
> modifications I'll be able to get anything out of the database with a
> minimum of entries from the user.
>
> It turns out that 'results' was a tuple of dictionaries.  I got an
> error trying to call the tuple; converting it to a list worked.  Here
> is the current function:
>
> import MySQLdb
>
> def name_find(namefrag):
>
>      conn = MySQLdb.connect(host = "localhost",
>           user = "root",
>           passwd = "Barron85",
>           db = "meds")
>      cursor = conn.cursor(MySQLdb.cursors.DictCursor)
>      cursor.execute("SELECT patient_ID, firstname, lastname FROM
> demographics WHERE lastname LIKE '%s%%'" % (namefrag))
>
>      results = cursor.fetchall()
>      for index, row in enumerate(results):
>           print "%d %s   %s %s" % (index, row["patient_ID"],
> row["firstname"], row["lastname"])
>      indx = int(raw_input("Select the record you want: "))
>      results_list = list(results)
>      return results_list[indx]['patient_ID']
>
>      cursor.close()
>      conn.close()
>
> This returns the patient_ID after selecting a name from the list, eg
> 615L.  I'm not sure why the "L" is there but it shouldn't be hard to
> remove.  

It's a long integer. You don't have to worry about it:

>>> a = long(615)
>>> a
615L
>>> print a
615

Notice the L is gone when you go to use it:

>>> print 'SELECT * FROM test WHERE pid=%s' % a
SELECT * FROM test WHERE pid=615


> Mensanator, thanks a lot for your help.  This has been quite
> a lot to digest--huge leap in my understanding of Python.
>
> Michael Barron
>
> On Oct 31, 12:32 am, "mensana... at aol.com" <mensana... at aol.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Oct 30, 7:39?pm, barronmo <barro... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > I didn't know "result" was alist!
>
> > I don't use MySQL but that's how others work.
> > Eachlistitem is a record, each record a tuple
> > of field values.
>
> > > Can all that info be stored in alist?
>
> > If you don't fetch too many records at once.
> > This is a test of my word database using ODBC
> > and MS-ACCESS (the SQL is very simple since
> > all the actual work is done in MS-ACCESS, Python
> > is just retrieving the final results).
>
> > import dbi
> > import odbc
> > con = odbc.odbc("words")
> > cursor = con.cursor()
> > cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM signature_anagram_summary")
> > results = cursor.fetchall()
>
> > Here, results (the recipient of .fetchall) is alistof tuples.
> > The contents are:
>
> > [(9, 10, 'anoretics', '10101000100001100111000000'),
> > (9, 10, 'atroscine', '10101000100001100111000000'),
> > (9, 10, 'certosina', '10101000100001100111000000'),
> > (9, 10, 'creations', '10101000100001100111000000'),
> > (9, 10, 'narcotise', '10101000100001100111000000'),
> > (9, 10, 'ostracine', '10101000100001100111000000'),
> > (9, 10, 'reactions', '10101000100001100111000000'),
> > (9, 10, 'secration', '10101000100001100111000000'),
> > (9, 10, 'tinoceras', '10101000100001100111000000'),
> > (9, 10, 'tricosane', '10101000100001100111000000')]
>
> > > How do the columns work?
>
> > I don't know, I don't get column names. It looked like
> > from your example that you can use names, I would have
> > to use indexes, such as results[3][2] to get 'creations'.
> > Maybe MySQL returns dictionaries instead of tuples.
>
> > > I was curious to see what the data
> > > looked like but I can't seem to print "result" from the prompt.  Do
> > > variables used inside functions live or die once the function
> > > executes?
>
> > Yeah, they die. You would have to have the function return
> > the resultslistand indx, then you could use it's contents
> > as criteria for further queries.
>
> > So you might want to say
>
> > name_find_results,indx = name_find(namefrag)
>
> > > If they die, how do I get around this?
>
> > Add 'return results,indx' to the function. Or better still,
> > just return the record the user selected
> >     return results[indx]
> > You wouldn't need indx anymore since there's only 1 record.
>
> > > I tried defining 'r
> > > = ""' in the module before the function and then using it instead of
> > > "result" but that didn't help.
>
> > > Mike- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -