consecutive statements in for loop

[Clinton Miskell]

Hey guys, wondering if anyone has a better way to do this. Seems to work well, but it seems like it could be easier (no list hopefully). I have a bunch of huge queries that I keep in an external module. I assign each statement to a variable, then add the variable to a list:

statements.py
var1="""some insert statement"""
var2="""some insert statement"""
var3="""call some proceedure""" and so-on.

list = [var1, var2, var3]

---

execute.py:

import MySQLdb, settings, mailer, statements

def sql(statement):
try:
con = MySQLdb.connect (host=settings.server,user=settings.user,passwd=settings.password,db=settings.database)
cursor = con.cursor()
cursor.execute(statement)
cursor.close()
con.close

except MySQLdb.Error, e:
    error = "Warehouse Error %d: %s" % (e.args[0], e.args[1])
    mailer.sendMail(settings.emailAddress, error, statement)
    sys.exit(1)

for item in statements.list:
sql(item)

If anyone knows if im doing something silly here please let me know! Thanks!

[Kyle VanderBeek]

That's a pretty common idiom, so I wouldn't call it silly. Mind using "list" as a variable name, though; it's not a reserved word in Python, but it is a built-in type and you could end up getting confusing results later.

Additionally I will pimp my recent blog entry about using decorators for such standard idioms:
http://www.kylev.com/2009/05/22/python-decorators-and-database-idioms/