Get a list of field values from Python's sqlite3, not tuples representing rows

It's annoying how Python's sqlite3 module always returns a list of tuples! When I am querying a single column, I would prefer to get a plain list.

e.g. when I execute

SELECT somecol FROM sometable

and call

cursor.fetchall()

it returns

[(u'one',), (u'two',), (u'three',)]

but I'd rather just get

[u'one', u'two', u'three']

Is there a way to do this?

sqlite3.Connection has a row_factory attribute.

The documentation states that:

You can change this attribute to a callable that accepts the cursor and the original row as a tuple and will return the real result row. This way, you can implement more advanced ways of returning results, such as returning an object that can also access columns by name.

To return a list of single values from a SELECT, such as an id, you can assign a lambda to row_factory which returns the first indexed value in each row; e.g:

import sqlite3 as db

conn = db.connect('my.db')
conn.row_factory = lambda cursor, row: row[0]
c = conn.cursor()
ids = c.execute('SELECT id FROM users').fetchall()

This yields something like:

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] # etc.

You can also set the row_factory directly on the cursor object itself. Indeed, if you do not set the row_factory on the connection before you create the cursor, you must set the row_factory on the cursor:

c = conn.cursor()
c.row_factory = lambda cursor, row: {'foo': row[0]}

You may redefine the row_factory at any point during the lifetime of the cursor object, and you can unset the row factory with None to return default tuple-based results:

c.row_factory = None
c.execute('SELECT id FROM users').fetchall() # [(1,), (2,), (3,)] etc.

data=cursor.fetchall()
COLUMN = 0
column=[elt[COLUMN] for elt in data]

(My previous suggestion, column=zip(*data)[COLUMN], raises an IndexError if data is an empty tuple. In contrast, the list comprehension above just creates an empty list. Depending on your situation, raising an IndexError may be preferable, but I'll leave that to you to decide.)

You don't really want to do this - anything you do along the lines of using zip or a list comprehension is just eating CPU cycles and sucking memory without adding significant value. You are far better served just dealing with the tuples.

As for why it returns tuples, it's because that is what the Python DBD API 2.0 requires from fetchall.

I use the module pandas to deal with table-like content:

df = pd.DataFrame(cursor.fetchall(), columns=['one','two'])

The list of values for column 'one' is simply reffered as:

df['one'].values

You even can use you own index for the data referencing:

df0 = pd.DataFrame.from_records(cursor.fetchall(), columns=['Time','Serie1','Serie2'],index='Time')