ProgrammingError: (1064, "You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'S SIZE 11.5 NEW IN BOX', '$49.99')' at line 1")

[Daniel Watkins]

On Mon, Dec 09, 2013 at 12:41:57AM -0800, Jai wrote:
>         sql = """insert into `category` (url, catagory,price) VAlUES ('%s', '%s', '%s')"""%(link1,x,y)
>         sql = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', sql).encode('ascii','ignore')
>         cursor.execute(sql)
> 
> ProgrammingError: (1064, "You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'S SIZE 11.5 NEW IN BOX', '$49.99')' at line 1")

Though you haven't given the full traceback, I suspect that the lines
above are what is causing your problem.  My best guess is that you're
being hit by a form of SQL injection[0], in that the values you are
combining in to your query have single quotes which are resulting in an
SQL statement that looks like:

    insert into `category` (url, category, price) VALUES ('...', 'MEN'S SIZE 11.5 NEW IN BOX', '$49.99');

As you can see, the second value you are passing has mismatched quotes.
This is a common problem, so the MySQLdb library handles it by allowing
you to pass in the values you want to cursor.execute; it then takes care
of escaping them correctly:

    sql = """insert into `category` (url, catagory,price) VAlUES ('%s', '%s', '%s')"""
    cursor.execute(sql, (link1, x, y))

I'm not 100% sure what the Unicode normalisation is meant to be doing,
so you'll have to work out how to integrate that yourself.


Cheers,

Dan


[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection