Printing all rows of a SQLite database in Android

Question

For debugging/checkpointing purposes, I wanted to print out all rows of a SQLite database in Android. I did not find anything that answered this precise question: How can I easily print out all rows of a SQLite database in a human-readable format?

Answer 1

The solution I came up with looks like this:

public class DbHelper extends SQLiteOpenHelper {
    String TAG = "DbHelper";
    ... // functions omitted


    /**
     * Helper function that parses a given table into a string
     * and returns it for easy printing. The string consists of 
     * the table name and then each row is iterated through with
     * column_name: value pairs printed out.
     *
     * @param db the database to get the table from
     * @param tableName the the name of the table to parse
     * @return the table tableName as a string
     */
    public String getTableAsString(SQLiteDatabase db, String tableName) {
        Log.d(TAG, "getTableAsString called");
        String tableString = String.format("Table %s:\n", tableName);
        Cursor allRows  = db.rawQuery("SELECT * FROM " + tableName, null);
        if (allRows.moveToFirst() ){
            String[] columnNames = allRows.getColumnNames();
            do {
                for (String name: columnNames) {
                    tableString += String.format("%s: %s\n", name,
                            allRows.getString(allRows.getColumnIndex(name)));
                }
                tableString += "\n";

            } while (allRows.moveToNext());
        }

        return tableString;
    }

}

Hope this helps some of you.

Answer 2

I changed it a bit: separated the Cursor toString (can be used independently), designed as a Table print.

public String tableToString(SQLiteDatabase db, String tableName) {
    Log.d("","tableToString called");
    String tableString = String.format("Table %s:\n", tableName);
    Cursor allRows  = db.rawQuery("SELECT * FROM " + tableName, null);
    tableString += cursorToString(allRows);
    return tableString;
}

public String cursorToString(Cursor cursor){
    String cursorString = "";
    if (cursor.moveToFirst() ){
        String[] columnNames = cursor.getColumnNames();
        for (String name: columnNames) 
            cursorString += String.format("%s ][ ", name);
        cursorString += "\n";
        do {
            for (String name: columnNames) {
                cursorString += String.format("%s ][ ",
                        cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex(name)));
            }
            cursorString += "\n";
        } while (cursor.moveToNext());
    }
    return cursorString;
}