Reading a SQLite file using Python

Question

I am working on an assignment where in we were provided a bunch of csv files to work on and extract information . I have succesfuly completed that part. As a bonus question we have 1 SQlite file with a .db extension . I wanted to know if any module exists to convert such files to .csv or to read them directly ?

In case such a method doesnt exist , ill probably insert the file into a database and use the python sqlite3 module to extract the data I need.

Answer 1

You can use the sqlite commandline tool to dump table data to CSV.

To export an SQLite table (or part of a table) as CSV, simply set the "mode" to "csv" and then run a query to extract the desired rows of the table.

sqlite> .header on
sqlite> .mode csv
sqlite> .once c:/work/dataout.csv
sqlite> SELECT * FROM tab1;

In the example above, the " .header on " line causes column labels to be printed as the first row of output. This means that the first row of the resulting CSV file will contain column labels. If column labels are not desired, set ".header off" instead. (The ".header off" setting is the default and can be omitted if the headers have not been previously turned on.)

The line " .once FILENAME " causes all query output to go into the named file instead of being printed on the console. In the example above, that line causes the CSV content to be written into a file named "C:/work/dataout.csv".

http://www.sqlite.org/cli.html