Getting column names from a cursor using ODBC module?

[M.-A. Lemburg]

John Machin 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 :)

mxODBC comes with a cursor.columns() method which allows you to
query column names and many other column specific details of the
database.

See the documentation for details:

http://www.egenix.com/products/python/mxODBC/#Documentation

If you just want to access the result set columns by name,
you can use the cursor.description tuple to map names to
positions.

Please also see the FAQ of the DB API spec reagrding the issues
involved with this approach:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0249/

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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