Answer My Searches

It turns out there’s a new MySQL connection library called MySQL Connector.

I installed it and then I just imported that into my script and everything else seemed to work normally. At least for my simply import script.

import mysql.connector as MySQLdb

I believe this library is designed for those who want to connect to MySQL on another server. It doesn’t seem to require any MySQL libraries to be installed.

When I tried to install mySQLdb it complained with the following message. I’m guessing the problem was that it requires MySQL to be installed:

File "/Users/pinerog/Downloads/MySQL-python-1.2.3/setup_posix.py", line 24, in mysql_config
raise EnvironmentError("%s not found" % (mysql_config.path,))
EnvironmentError: mysql_config not found


I made a zip file in Python and tried to open it on my mac. I got the error mentioned in the title.

Investigating further, I got this information from running:

lm1:Downloads pinerog$ unzip -t costume_spreadsheets_from_jackrabbit.zip

Archive:  costume_spreadsheets_from_jackrabbit.zip
  End-of-central-directory signature not found.  Either this file is not
  a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive.  In the
  latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on
  the last disk(s) of this archive.
unzip:  cannot find zipfile directory in one of costume_spreadsheets_from_jackrabbit.zip or
        costume_spreadsheets_from_jackrabbit.zip.zip, and cannot find costume_spreadsheets_from_jackrabbit.zip.ZIP, period.

Well, silly me, I forgot to close the zip file I made in Python. Here is the correct code for generating a zip file. Make sure you close the zip file object!

import zipfile
import glob, os

file = zipfile.ZipFile("test.zip", "w")
for name in glob.glob("samples/*"):
    file.write(name, os.path.basename(name), zipfile.ZIP_DEFLATED)
file.close()

The sheet object has this method:

write_merge(r1,r2,c1,c2,label,style)

Style and label are optional.

There is an example of its use here:

https://secure.simplistix.co.uk/svn/xlwt/trunk/xlwt/examples/merged0.py

I couldn’t find any documentation on this, so I wrote a quick Python script to test this:

"""
Test how many items can be in MySQL's in clause

Table I'm using for testing:
CREATE
    TABLE INTEST
    (
        id bigint NOT NULL,
        PRIMARY KEY (id)
    )
    ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
"""
import MySQLdb

conn = MySQLdb.connect(host = 'localhost',
    user = 'root', passwd = '*****', db = 'scratch', charset='latin1')
curs = conn.cursor()

#test maximum sql in clause
def test_sql_in():
    test_up_to = 20000
    curs.execute('truncate table INTEST')
    for i in range(1,test_up_to):
        curs.execute('INSERT INTO INTEST (id) VALUES (%s)', (i,))
    conn.commit()
    for i in range(1,test_up_to):
        in_str = ','.join([str(v) for v in range(1,i+1)])
        select_sql = "select * from INTEST where id in (%s)" % in_str
        curs.execute(select_sql)
        rows = curs.fetchall()
        assert len(rows) == i
        if i % 100 == 0: print i

test_sql_in()

It ran fine. I tried it up to 20,000 items. Though it does get pretty slow, even with the index.

Note: I only tried this on MySQL 5.1.55 on Fedora 14.

Your homework:

• How does it run for other MySQL engines such as MyISAM?
• Can it handle a higher number like 1 million?

Avid Answer my searches reader Jody writes in with this strange error:

weird error here. Couldn’t find my error on google anywhere. Might be rare. The error is within the urllib2 library. Not sure what happened.

python 2.7.0
active python install
Windows

urllib2.urlopen(r’http://www.google.com’)
url open gives “NameError: global name ‘r’ is not defined”

Not sure what caused this. But repairing the python install didn’t fix it. I had to uninstall/reinstall python to get this working again. Upgraded to python 2.7.1 also.