choose from a list

[barronmo]

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.  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