I'm having a hard time getting some sql in python to correctly go through MySQLdb. It's pythons string formatting that is killing me.
My sql statement is using the LIKE keyword with wildcards. I've tried a number of different things in Python. The problem is once I get one of them working, there's a line of code in MySQLdb that burps on string format.
Attempt 1:
"SELECT tag.userId, count(user.id) as totalRows FROM user INNER JOIN tag ON user.id = tag.userId WHERE user.username LIKE '%%s%'" % (query)
This is a no go. I get value error:
ValueError: unsupported format character ''' (0x27) at index 128
Attempt 2:
"SELECT tag.userId, count(user.id) as totalRows FROM user INNER JOIN tag ON user.id = tag.userId WHERE user.username LIKE '\%%s\%'" % (query)
I get the same result from attempt 1.
Attempt 3:
like = "LIKE '%" + str(query) + "%'" totalq = "SELECT tag.userId, count(user.id) as totalRows FROM user INNER JOIN tag ON user.id = tag.userId WHERE user.username " + like
This correctly creates the totalq variable, but now when I go to run the query I get errors from MySQLdb:
File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/MySQLdb/cursors.py", line 158, in execute query = query % db.literal(args) TypeError: not enough arguments for format string
Attempt 4:
like = "LIKE '\%" + str(query) + "\%'" totalq = "SELECT tag.userId, count(user.id) as totalRows FROM user INNER JOIN tag ON user.id = tag.userId WHERE user.username " + like
This is the same output as attempt 3.
This all seems really strange. How can I use wildcards in sql statements with python?
Those queries all appear to be vulnerable to SQL injection attacks.
Try something like this instead:
curs.execute("""SELECT tag.userId, count(user.id) as totalRows
FROM user
INNER JOIN tag ON user.id = tag.userId
WHERE user.username LIKE %s""", ('%' + query + '%',))
Where there are two arguments being passed to execute()
.