SQL for creating tables in a database using Python sqlite3

Question

I am trying to create a number of tables with different names (of course) but sharing the same schema. For this purpose, I am using executemany on a Cursor object as follows:

tables = ['Meanings', 'Synonyms', 'Antonyms', 'Examples', 'Phrases',
          'Pronunciations', 'Hyphenations']
create_table_query = '''CREATE TABLE (?) (
                                        id      INTEGER NOT NULL,
                                        text    TEXT,
                                        word_id INTEGER NOT NULL,
                                        PRIMARY KEY id,
                                        FOREIGN KEY(word_id) REFERENCES Word(id)
                                    )'''
cursor.executemany(create_table_query, tables)

When I execute this snippet, I get the following error message:

OperationalError: near "(": syntax error

I am having trouble fixing the bug here with my SQL since I find the error message to be not descriptive enough. I have tried the following queries but I am unable to develop the understanding of their success and my query's failure:

create_table_query_1 = '''CREATE TABLE {} (
                                         id INTEGER NOT NULL,
                                         text TEXT,
                                         word_id INTEGER NOT NULL,
                                         PRIMARY KEY id,
                                         FOREIGN KEY(word_id) REFERENCES Word(id)
                        )''' # Syntax error near "id"
create_table_query_2 = '''CREATE TABLE (?) (
                                         id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
                                         text TEXT,
                                         word_id INTEGER NOT NULL,
                                         FOREIGN KEY(word_id) REFERENCES Word(id)
                        )''' # Syntax error near "("

create_table_query_1 = '''CREATE TABLE {} (
                                         id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
                                         text TEXT,
                                         word_id INTEGER NOT NULL,
                                         FOREIGN KEY(word_id) REFERENCES Word(id)
                        )''' # works with string formatting

Also, what are other efficient(in terms of time) ways to achieve the same?

Answer 1

To put my comment into an answer and expand on it: you cannot parametrize table nor column names. I was unable to find any documentation on this...

In a couple of the other examples you have extra parens/brackets that SQLite doesn't need.

So the solution, as you've found, is to use string substitution for the table names as in your final example.

Here's an example with a loop over all of your tables:

for table in tables:
    cursor.execute('''CREATE TABLE {} (
                          id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
                          text TEXT,
                          word_id INTEGER NOT NULL,
                          FOREIGN KEY(word_id) REFERENCES Word(id)
                        )'''.format(table))

I am not completely clear on why you want different tables for the different types of words, though, as this would seem to go against the principles of database design.