I have a malformed database. When I try to get records from any of two tables, it throws an exception:
DatabaseError: database disk image is malformed
I know that through commandline I can do this:
sqlite3 ".dump" base.db | sqlite3 new.db
Can I do something like this from within Python?
As far as i know you cannot do that (alas, i might be mistaken), because the sqlite3 module for python is very limited.
Only workaround i can think of involves calling the os command shell (e.g. terminal, cmd, ...) (more info) via pythons call-command:
Combine it with the info from here to do something like this:
This is done on an windows xp machine:
Unfortunately i can't test it on a unix machine right now - hope it will help you:
from subprocess import check_call
def sqliterepair():
check_call(["sqlite3", "C:/sqlite-tools/base.db", ".mode insert", ".output C:/sqlite-tools/dump_all.sql", ".dump", ".exit"])
check_call(["sqlite3", "C:/sqlite-tools/new.db", ".read C:/sqlite-tools/dump_all.sql", ".exit"])
return
The first argument is calling the sqlite3.exe. Because it is in my system path variable, i don't need to specify the path or the suffix ".exe".
The other arguments are chained into the sqlite3-shell.
Note that the argument ".exit" is required so the sqlite-shell will exit. Otherwise the check_call() will never complete because the outer cmd-shell or terminal will be in suspended.
Of course the dump-file should be removed afterwards...
EDIT: Much shorter solution (credit goes to OP (see comment))
os.system("sqlite3 C:/sqlite-tools/base.db .dump | sqlite3 C:/sqlite-tools/target.db")
Just tested this: it works. Apparently i was wrong in the comments.
If I understood properly, what you want is to duplicate an sqlite3 database in python. Here is how I would do it:
# oldDB = path to the corrupted db,
# newDB = path to the new db
def duplicateDB(oldDB, newDB):
con = sqlite3.connect(oldDB)
script = ''.join(con.iterdump())
con.close()
con = sqlite3.connect(newDB)
con.executescript(script)
con.close()
print "duplicated %s into %s" % (oldDB,newDB)
In your example, call duplicateDB('base.db', 'new.db')
. The iterdump
function is equivalent to dump
.
Note that if you use Python 3, you will need to change the print
statement.