Is there a way to get a list of column names in sqlite?

Question

I want to get a list of column names from a table in a database. Using pragma I get a list of tuples with a lot of unneeded information. Is there a way to get only the column names? So I might end up with something like this:

[Column1, Column2, Column3, Column4]

The reason why I absolutely need this list is because I want to search for a column name in the list and get the index because the index is used in a lot of my code.

Is there a way of getting a list like this?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use sqlite3 and pep-249

import sqlite3 connection = sqlite3.connect('~/foo.sqlite') cursor = connection.execute('select * from bar') 

cursor.description is description of columns

names = list(map(lambda x: x[0], cursor.description)) 

Alternatively you could use a list comprehension:

names = [description[0] for description in cursor.description] 

Answer 2

An alternative to the cursor.description solution from smallredstone could be to use row.keys():

import sqlite3 connection = sqlite3.connect('~/foo.sqlite') connection.row_factory = sqlite3.Row cursor = connection.execute('select * from bar') # instead of cursor.description: row = cursor.fetchone() names = row.keys() 

The drawback: it only works if there is at least a row returned from the query.

The benefit: you can access the columns by their name (row['your_column_name'])

Read more about the Row objects in the python documentation.