Fetching rows as dictionaries with MySQL Connector/Python (revised)

It is possible with MySQL Connector/Python to define your own cursor classes. A very good use case is to return rows as dictionary instead of tuples. This post shows how to do this using MySQL Connector/Python v1.0 and is an update for an older blog entry.

In the example below we are subclassing the MySQLCursor class to create a new class called MySQLCursorDict. We change the _row_to_python() method to return a dictionary instead of a tuple. The keys of the dictionary will be (unicode) column names.

from pprint import pprint
import mysql.connector

class MySQLCursorDict(mysql.connector.cursor.MySQLCursor):
    def _row_to_python(self, rowdata, desc=None):
        row = super(MySQLCursorDict, self)._row_to_python(rowdata, desc)
        if row:
            return dict(zip(self.column_names, row))
        return None

cnx = mysql.connector.connect(user='root', database='test')
cur = cnx.cursor(cursor_class=MySQLCursorDict)
cur.execute("SELECT c1, c2 FROM t1")
rows = cur.fetchall()
pprint(rows)
cur.close()
cnx.close()

The output of the above script would be (formatted):

[
 {u'c1': 1,
  u'c2': 10},
 {u'c1': 2,
  u'c2': 20}
]

Depending on your needs, you can subclass from any class found in the mysql.connector.cursor module, but note that you will need to change some other methods to make it work.