Getting column names from a cursor using ODBC module?

[John Machin]

On Jun 22, 12:19 am, John Machin <sjmac... at lexicon.net> wrote:
> On Jun 21, 11:58 pm, dana... at yahoo.com wrote:
>
> > Is there any way to retrieve column names from a cursor using the ODBC
> > module? Or must I, in advance, create a dictionary of column position
> > and column names for a particular table before I can access column
> > values by column names? I'd prefer sticking with the ODBC module for
> > now because it comes standard in Python.
>
> > I'm using Python 2.4 at the moment.
>
> Do you mean the odbc module? If so, it doesn't come standard in
> Python; it's part of the win32 package.
>
> I haven't used it for years -- my preference on Windows these days
> would be mxODBC if the client would pay the licence fee, otherwise
> pyodbc. Sorry I'm not answering your question ... perhaps you should
> be asking a different question :)
>
> Cheers,
> John

But to help you answer your question: if the module that you are using
supports the 2.0 version of the database API (see http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0249/),
then it will support the cursor.description attribute, which gives you
not only the name but the type and 5 other bits of info about each
column. If it doesn't, I'd suggest moving on.

HTH,
John