Anyone know if the MySQLdb will automatically escape string literals for SQL statements?
For instance I am trying to execute the following:
cursor.execute("""SELECT * FROM `accounts` WHERE `account_name` = 'Blah'""")
Will this escape the account name automatically? Or will it only escape if I do the following?:
x = 'Blah'
cursor.execute("""SELECT * FROM `accounts` WHERE `account_name` = %s""", (x))
Or will it do it for both? Can anyone clarify this as I can't find any information on it.
There is no escaping in the first example, it is a raw SQL query. It's valid, it'll work, but obviously it only makes sense if you always want to search for account Blah.
When you need to get an account from a name in a variable, you will need the parameterised version. However your example may not work as expected as (x) isn't a tuple, it's just the value x. x in a tuple sequence would be (x,). To avoid confusion you may prefer to use the list [x].
Escaping is only done when you give the query and data to MySQLdb separately. That's how it knows what to escape. :-)
Thus, only your 2nd example will escape:
x = ('Blah',)
cursor.execute("""SELECT * FROM `accounts` WHERE `account_name` = %s""", x)
Note how I changed x to to tuple. That is what MySQLdb expects. It sort of makes sense since you may need to pass in multiple variables. Like:
x = ('Blah','Foo23')
cursor.execute("""SELECT * FROM `accounts` WHERE `account_name` = %s OR `account_code` = %s""", x)
Let me know if this answers your question.
Good Luck. :-)
(x).