Using python to write mysql query to csv, need to show field names

Question

I have the following:

import MySQLdb as dbapi
import sys
import csv

dbServer='localhost'
dbPass='supersecretpassword'
dbSchema='dbTest'
dbUser='root'

dbQuery='SELECT * FROM pbTest.Orders;'

db=dbapi.connect(host=dbServer,user=dbUser,passwd=dbPass)
cur=db.cursor()
cur.execute(dbQuery)
result=cur.fetchall()

c = csv.writer(open("temp.csv","wb"))
c.writerow(result)

This produces a garbled mess. I am familiar with using printing record[0] etc. Not sure how I should be going about setting up the formatting. to produce something like what a query would in a console. I cannot do a simple INTO OUTFILE from the mysql server.

---

Update

It's been 8 years; I still get the occasional update or query about this question.

As stated in some of the comments, the cursor.description from the DBAPI is what I was looking for.

Here is a more modern example in Python 3 using the pymysql driver to connect to MariaDB, which will select and fetch all rows into a tuple, the row headers/description into a list. I then merge these two data structures into a single list, to be written to a csv file.

With the header names being the first entry in the result list; writing the result to a file in a linear fashion ensures the row header is the first line in the CSV file.

import pymysql
import csv
import sys

db_opts = {
    'user': 'A',
    'password': 'C',
    'host': 'C',
    'database': 'D'
}

db = pymysql.connect(**db_opts)
cur = db.cursor()

sql = 'SELECT * from schema_name.table_name where id=123'
csv_file_path = '/tmp/my_csv_file.csv'

try:
    cur.execute(sql)
    rows = cur.fetchall()
finally:
    db.close()

# Continue only if there are rows returned.
if rows:
    # New empty list called 'result'. This will be written to a file.
    result = list()

    # The row name is the first entry for each entity in the description tuple.
    column_names = list()
    for i in cur.description:
        column_names.append(i[0])

    result.append(column_names)
    for row in rows:
        result.append(row)

    # Write result to file.
    with open(csv_file_path, 'w', newline='') as csvfile:
        csvwriter = csv.writer(csvfile, delimiter=',', quotechar='"', quoting=csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL)
        for row in result:
            csvwriter.writerow(row)
else:
    sys.exit("No rows found for query: {}".format(sql))

Answer 1

You can dump all results to the csv file without looping:

rows = cursor.fetchall()
fp = open('/tmp/file.csv', 'w')
myFile = csv.writer(fp)
myFile.writerows(rows)
fp.close()