execute with args doesn't work

[Jonathan Livni]

I don't know why, but a simple execute won't work for me:

This works: cursor.execute("""select * from table_a""")
This doesn't: cursor.execute("""select * from %s""",("table_a",))

I receive the following error:
ProgrammingError: (1064, "You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ''table_a'' at line 1")

I use Python 2.5.4 and the MySQLdb 1.2.2 in windows and executed the commands in IDLE

(I'm not sure this is relevant, but notice that table_a has two apostrophes before and two after instead of inverted commas)

Please help :)

[Andy Dustman]

You can't pass table names as parameters. This is true for any DB-API database adapter.

[Jonathan Livni]

Thanks for the quick answers. It worked! I still have a few questions though:

1) When is it legitimate to use the args and when not?

2) If can't use the args - I can't use executemany! This forces me to use a loop. Isn't there an alternative?

3) I've actually executed cursor.execute('ALTER TABLE table_a ADD %s text' % column_name) to create new tables. One of the tables already existed so I received an OperationalError. I tried to capture it (with try\except) but Python couldn't. Why?

The error: OperationalError: (1060, "Duplicate column name 'column_a'")

When I tried to capture it: NameError: global name 'OperationalError' is not defined

[DScher]

Try this:

cursor.execute('SELECT * FROM %s' % ('table_a'))