Output pyodbc cursor results as python dictionary

Question

How do I serialize pyodbc cursor output (from .fetchone, .fetchmany or .fetchall) as a Python dictionary?

I'm using bottlepy and need to return dict so it can return it as JSON.

Answer 1

If you don't know columns ahead of time, use cursor.description to build a list of column names and zip with each row to produce a list of dictionaries. Example assumes connection and query are built:

>>> cursor = connection.cursor().execute(sql)
>>> columns = [column[0] for column in cursor.description]
>>> print columns
['name', 'create_date']
>>> results = []
>>> for row in cursor.fetchall():
...     results.append(dict(zip(columns, row)))
...
>>> print results
[{'create_date': datetime.datetime(2003, 4, 8, 9, 13, 36, 390000), 'name': u'master'},   
 {'create_date': datetime.datetime(2013, 1, 30, 12, 31, 40, 340000), 'name': u'tempdb'},
 {'create_date': datetime.datetime(2003, 4, 8, 9, 13, 36, 390000), 'name': u'model'},     
 {'create_date': datetime.datetime(2010, 4, 2, 17, 35, 8, 970000), 'name': u'msdb'}]