DictCursor doesn't seem to work under psycopg2

Question

I haven't worked with psycopg2 before but I'm trying to change the cursor factory to DictCursor so that fetchall or fetchone will return a dictionary instead of a list.

I created a test script to make things simple and only test this functionality. Here's my little bit of code that I feel should work

import psycopg2
import psycopg2.extras

conn = psycopg2.connect("dbname=%s user=%s password=%s" % (DATABASE, USERNAME, PASSWORD))

cur = conn.cursor(cursor_factory = psycopg2.extras.DictCursor)
cur.execute("SELECT * from review")

res = cur.fetchall()

print type(res)
print res

The res variable is always a list and not a dictionary as I would expect.

A current workaround that I've implemented is to use this function that builds a dictionary and run each row returned by fetchall through it.

def build_dict(cursor, row):
    x = {}
    for key,col in enumerate(cursor.description):
        x[col[0]] = row[key]
    return d

Python is version 2.6.7 and psycopg2 is version 2.4.2.

Answer 1

Use RealDictCursor:

import psycopg2.extras

cur = conn.cursor(cursor_factory = psycopg2.extras.RealDictCursor)
cur.execute("SELECT * from review")
res = cur.fetchall()    

This gives you a list with rows as real python dictionaries instead of "advanced psycopg2 list".