Python Application Programming

MODULE – 5
NETWORKED PROGRAMS
In this era of internet, it is a requirement in many situations to retrieve the data from web and to
process it. In this section, we will discuss basics of network protocols and Python libraries available
to extract data from web.

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is the media through which we can retrieve web- based data.
The HTTP is an application protocol for distributed and hypermedia information systems. HTTP is
the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web. Hypertext is structured text that
uses logical links (hyperlinks) between nodes containing text. HTTP is the protocol to exchange or
transfer hypertext.

Consider a situation:
 you try to read a socket, but the program on the other end of the socket has not sent any data,
then you need to wait.
 If the programs on both ends of the socket simply wait for some data without sending
anything, they will wait for a very long time.

So an important part of programs that communicate over the Internet is to have some sort of
protocol. A protocol is a set of precise rules that determine
 Who will send request for what purpose
 What action to be taken
 What response to be given

To send request and to receive response, HTTP uses GET and POST methods.

NOTE: To test all the programs in this section, you must be connected to internet.

The World’s Simplest Web Browser

The built-in module socket of Python facilitates the programmer to make network connections and to
retrieve data over those sockets in a Python program. Socket is bidirectional data path to a remote
system. A socket is much like a file, except that a single socket provides a two-way connection
between two programs. You can both read from and write to the same socket. If you write
something to a socket, it is sent to the application at the other end of the socket. If you read from the
socket, you are given the data which the other application has sent.

Consider a simple program to retrieve the data from a web page. To understand the program given
below, one should know the meaning of terminologies used there.

 AF_INET is an address family (IP) that is used to designate the type of addresses that your
socket can communicate with. When you create a socket, you have to

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specify its address family, and then you can use only addresses of that type with the socket.
 SOCK_STREAM is a constant indicating the type of socket (TCP). It works as a file stream
and is most reliable over the network.
 Port is a logical end-point. Port 80 is one of the most commonly used port numbers
in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) suite.
 The command to retrieve the data must use CRLF(Carriage Return Line Feed) line endings,
and it must end in \r\n\r\n (line break in protocol specification).
 encode() method applied on strings will return bytes-representation of the string. Instead of
encode() method, one can attach a character b at the beginning of the string for the same
effect.
 decode() method returns a string decoded from the given bytes.

A socket connection between the user program and the webpage is shown in Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1 A Socket Connection

Now, observe the following program –

import socket

mysock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) mysock.connect(('data.pr4e.org',

80))
cmd='GET http://data.pr4e.org/romeo.txt HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n'.encode() mysock.send(cmd)

while True:
data = mysock.recv(512) if
(len(data) < 1):
break print(data.decode(),end='')

mysock.close()

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When we run above program, we will get some information related to web-server of the website
which we are trying to scrape. Then, we will get the data written in that web-page. In this program,
we are extracting 512 bytes of data at a time. (One can use one’s convenient number here). The
extracted data is decoded and printed. When the length of data becomes less than one (that is, no
more data left out on the web page), the loop is terminated.

Retrieving an Image over HTTP

In the previous section, we retrieved the text data from the webpage. Similar logic can be used to
extract images on the webpage using HTTP. In the following program, we extract the image data in
the chunks of 5120 bytes at a time, store that data in a string, trim off the headers and then store the
image file on the disk.

import socket
import time

HOST = 'data.pr4e.org' #host name

PORT = 80 #port number

mysock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) mysock.connect((HOST,

PORT))

mysock.sendall(b'GET http://data.pr4e.org/cover3.jpg HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n')

count = 0
picture = b"" #empty string in binary format

while True:
data = mysock.recv(5120) #retrieve 5120 bytes at a time if (len(data) <
1):
break

time.sleep(0.25) #programmer can see data retrieval easily count = count +

len(data)
print(len(data), count) #display cumulative data retrieved picture =
picture + data

mysock.close()

pos = picture.find(b"\r\n\r\n") #find end of the header (2 CRLF) print('Header length', pos)
print(picture[:pos].decode())

# Skip past the header and save the picture data picture = picture[pos+4:]

fhand = open("stuff.jpg", "wb") #image is stored as stuff.jpg

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fhand.write(picture) fhand.close()

When we run the above program, the amount of data (in bytes) retrieved from the internet is
displayed in a cumulative format. At the end, the image file ‘stuff.jpg’ will be stored in the current
working directory. (One has to verify it by looking at current working directory of the program).

Retrieving Web Pages with urllib

Python provides simpler way of webpage retrieval using the library urllib. Here, webpage is treated
like a file. urllib handles all of the HTTP protocol and header details. Following is the code
equivalent to the program given in Section 5.1.2.

import urllib.request

fhand = urllib.request.urlopen('http://data.pr4e.org/romeo.txt') for line in fhand:

print(line.decode().strip())

Once the web page has been opened with urllib.urlopen, we can treat it like a file and read through it
using a for-loop. When the program runs, we only see the output of the contents of the file. The
headers are still sent, but the urllib code consumes the headers and only returns the data to us.

Following is the program to retrieve the data from the file romeo.txt which is residing at
www.data.pr4e.org, and then to count number of words in it.

import urllib.request
fhand = urllib.request.urlopen('http://data.pr4e.org/romeo.txt') counts = dict()

for line in fhand:

words = line.decode().split() for word in
words:
counts[word] = counts.get(word, 0) + 1 print(counts)

Reading Binary Files using urllib

Sometimes you want to retrieve a non-text (or binary) file such as an image or video file. The data in
these files is generally not useful to print out, but you can easily make a copy of a URL to a local file
on your hard disk using urllib. In Section 5.1.3, we have seen how to retrieve image file from the
web using sockets. Now, here is an equivalent program using urllib.

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import urllib.request img=urllib.request.urlopen('http://data.pr4e.org/cover3.jpg').read() fhand =

open('cover3.jpg', 'wb')
fhand.write(img) fhand.close()

Once we execute the above program, we can see a file cover3.jpg in the current working directory in
our computer.

The program reads all of the data in at once across the network and stores it in the variable img in the
main memory of your computer, then opens the file cover.jpg and writes the data out to your disk.
This will work if the size of the file is less than the size of the memory (RAM) of your computer.
However, if this is a large audio or video file, this program may crash or at least run extremely
slowly when your computer runs out of memory. In order to avoid memory overflow, we retrieve the
data in blocks (or buffers) and then write each block to your disk before retrieving the next block.
This way the program can read any size file without using up all of the memory you have in your
computer.

Following is another version of above program, where data is read in chunks and then stored onto
the disk.

import urllib.request

img=urllib.request.urlopen('http://data.pr4e.org/cover3.jpg') fhand = open('cover3.jpg', 'wb')

size = 0

while True:
info = img.read(100000) if
len(info) < 1:
break
size = size + len(info)
fhand.write(info)

print(size, 'characters copied.') fhand.close()

Once we run the above program, an image file cover3.jpg will be stored on to the current working
directory.

Parsing HTML and Scraping the Web

One of the common uses of the urllib capability in Python is to scrape the web. Web scraping is
when we write a program that pretends to be a web browser and retrieves pages, then examines the
data in those pages looking for patterns. Example: a search engine such as Google will look at the
source of one web page and extract the links to other pages and retrieve those pages, extracting
links, and so on. Using this technique,

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Google spiders its way through nearly all of the pages on the web. Google also uses the frequency
of links from pages it finds to a particular page as one measure of how “important” a page is and
how high the page should appear in its search results.

Parsing HTML using Regular Expressions

Sometimes, we may need to parse the data on the web which matches a particular pattern. For this
purpose, we can use regular expressions. Now, we will consider a program that extracts all the
hyperlinks given in a particular webpage. To understand the Python program for this purpose, one
has to know the pattern of an HTML file. Here is a simple HTML file –

<h1>The First Page</h1>

<p>
If you like, you can switch to the
<a href="http://www.dr-chuck.com/page2.htm"> Second
Page</a>.
</p>

Here,
<h1> and </h1>are the beginning and end of header tags
<p>and </p>are the beginning and end of paragraph tags
<a>and </a>are the beginning and end of anchor tag which is used for giving links
hrefis the attribute for anchor tag which takes the value as the link for another page.

The above information clearly indicates that if we want to extract all the hyperlinks in a webpage,
we need a regular expression which matches the href attribute. Thus, we can create a regular
expression as –

href="http://.+?"

Here, the question mark in .+? indicate that the match should find smallest possible matching string.

Now, consider a Python program that uses the above regular expression to extract all hyperlinks
from the webpage given as input.

import urllib.request import re

url = input('Enter - ') #give URL of any website html =

urllib.request.urlopen(url).read()
links = re.findall(b'href="(http://.*?)"', html)

for link in links: print(link.decode())

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When we run this program, it prompts for user input. We need to give a valid URL of any website.
Then all the hyperlinks on that website will be displayed.

Parsing HTML using BeautifulSoup

There are a number of Python libraries which can help you parse HTML and extract data from the
pages. Each of the libraries has its strengths and weaknesses and you can pick one based on your
needs. BeautifulSoup library is one of the simplest libraries available for parsing. To use this,
download and install the BeautifulSoup code from:

http://www.crummy.com/software/

Consider the following program which uses urllib to read the page and uses BeautifulSoup to extract
hrefattribute from the anchor tag.

import urllib.request
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import ssl #Secure Socket Layer

ctx = ssl.create_default_context()
ctx.check_hostname = False ctx.verify_mode =
ssl.CERT_NONE

url = input('Enter - ')

html = urllib.request.urlopen(url,context=ctx).read() soup = BeautifulSoup(html,
'html.parser')
tags = soup('a')

for tag in tags: print(tag.get('href', None))

A sample output would be –

Enter - http://www.dr-chuck.com/page1.htm http://www.dr-
chuck.com/page2.htm

The above program prompts for a web address, then opens the web page, reads the data and passes
the data to the BeautifulSoup parser, and then retrieves all of the anchor tags and prints out the
href attribute for each tag.

The BeautifulSoup can be used to extract various parts of each tag as shown below –

from urllib.request import urlopen from bs4 import

BeautifulSoup import ssl

ctx = ssl.create_default_context()

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ctx.check_hostname = False ctx.verify_mode

= ssl.CERT_NONE

url = input('Enter - ')

html = urlopen(url, context=ctx).read() soup =

BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser") tags = soup('a')
for tag in tags:
print('TAG:', tag)
print('URL:', tag.get('href', None)) print('Contents:',
tag.contents[0]) print('Attrs:', tag.attrs)

The sample output would be –

Enter - http://www.dr-chuck.com/page1.htm
TAG: <a href="http://www.dr-chuck.com/page2.htm"> Second Page</a>
URL: http://www.dr-chuck.com/page2.htm Contents:
Second Page
Attrs: {'href': 'http://www.dr-chuck.com/page2.htm'}

USING WEB SERVICES

There are two common formats that are used while exchanging data across the web. One is HTML
and the other is XML (eXtensible Markup Language). In the previous section we have seen how to
retrieve the data from a web-page which is in the form of HTML. Now, we will discuss the retrieval
of data from web-page designed using XML.

XML is best suited for exchanging document-style data. When programs just want to exchange
dictionaries, lists, or other internal information with each other, they use JavaScript Object Notation
or JSON (refer www.json.org). We will look at both formats.

eXtensible Markup Language (XML)

XML looks very similar to HTML, but XML is more structured than HTML. Here is a sample of an
XML document:

<person>
<name>Chuck</name>
<phone type="intl">
+1 734 303 4456
</phone>
<email hide="yes"/>
</person>

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Often it is helpful to think of an XML document as a tree structure where there is a top tag
person and other tags such as phone are drawn as children of their parent nodes. Figure
is the tree structure for above given XML code.

Figure 5.2 Tree Representation of XML

Parsing XML
Python provides library xml.etree.ElementTree to parse the data from XML files. One has to provide
XML code as a string to built-in method fromstring() of ElementTree class. ElementTree acts as a
parser and provides a set of relevant methods to extract the data. Hence, the programmer need not
know the rules and the format of XML document syntax. The fromstring()method will convert XML
code into a tree-structure of XML nodes. When the XML is in a tree format, Python provides several
methods to extract data from XML. Consider the following program.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

#XML code embedded in a string format data = '''

<person>
<name>Chuck</name>
<phone type="intl">
+1 734 303 4456
</phone>
<email hide="yes"/>
</person>'''

tree = ET.fromstring(data)
print('Attribute for tag email:', tree.find('email').get('hide')) print('Attribute for tag phone:',
tree.find('phone').get('type'))

The output would be –

Name: Chuck
Attribute for the tag email: yes Attribute for the
tag phone: intl

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In the above example, fromstring() is used to convert XML code into a tree. The find() method
searches XML tree and retrieves a node that matches the specified tag. The get() method retrieves
the value associated with the specified attribute of that tag. Each node can have some text, some
attributes (like hide), and some “child” nodes. Each node can be the parent for a tree of nodes.

Looping Through Nodes

Most of the times, XML documents are hierarchical and contain multiple nodes. To process all the
nodes, we need to loop through all those nodes. Consider following example as an illustration.

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET input = '''

<stuff>
<users>
<user x="2">
<id>001</id>
<name>Chuck</name>
</user>
<user x="7">
<id>009</id>
<name>Brent</name>
</user>
</users>
</stuff>'''

stuff = ET.fromstring(input)
lst = stuff.findall('users/user') print('User count:',
len(lst))

for item in lst:

print('Name', item.find('name').text)
print('Id', item.find('id').text)
print('Attribute', item.get("x"))

The output would be –

User count: 2
Name Chuck
Id 001
Attribute 2
Name Brent Id
009
Attribute 7

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The findall() method retrieves a Python list of subtrees that represent the user structures in the XML
tree. Then we can write a for-loop that extracts each of the user nodes, and prints the name and id,
which are text elements as well as the attribute x from the user node.

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)

The JSON format was inspired by the object and array format used in the JavaScript language. But
since Python was invented before JavaScript, Python’s syntax for dictionaries and lists influenced
the syntax of JSON. So the format of JSON is a combination of Python lists and dictionaries.
Following is the JSON encoding that is roughly equivalent to the XML code (the string data) given
in the program of Section 5.2.2.

{
"name" : "Chuck",
"phone": {"type" : "intl", "number" : "+1 734 303 4456"}, "email": {"hide" : "yes"}
}

Observe the differences between XML code and JSON code:

 In XML, we can add attributes like “intl” to the “phone” tag. In JSON, we simply have key-
value pairs.
 XML uses tag “person”, which is replaced by a set of outer curly braces in JSON.

In general, JSON structures are simpler than XML because JSON has fewer capabilities than XML.
But JSON has the advantage that it maps directly to some combination of dictionaries and lists. And
since nearly all programming languages have something equivalent to Python’s dictionaries and
lists, JSON is a very natural format to have two compatible programs exchange data. JSON is
quickly becoming the format of choice for nearly all data exchange between applications because of
its relative simplicity compared to XML.

Parsing JSON
Python provides a module json to parse the data in JSON pages. Consider the following program
which uses JSON equivalent of XML string written in Section 5.2.3. Note that, the JSON string has
to embed a list of dictionaries.

import json

data = ''' [
{ "id" : "001",
"x" : "2",
"name" : "Chuck"
},
{ "id" : "009",
"x" : "7",

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"name" : "Chuck"
}
]'''

info = json.loads(data) print('User count:',

len(info))

for item in info:

print('Name', item['name'])
print('Id', item['id'])
print('Attribute', item['x'])

The output would be –

User count: 2
Name Chuck
Id 001
Attribute 2
Name Chuck Id
009
Attribute 7

Here, the string data contains a list of users, where each user is a key-value pair. The method loads()
in the json module converts the string into a list of dictionaries. Now onwards, we don’t need
anything from json, because the parsed data is available in Python native structures. Using a for-
loop, we can iterate through the list of dictionaries and extract every element (in the form of key-
value pair) as if it is a dictionary object. That is, we use index operator (a pair of square brackets) to
extract value for a particular key.

NOTE: Current IT industry trend is to use JSON for web services rather than XML. Because, JSON
is simpler than XML and it directly maps to native data structures we already have in the
programming languages. This makes parsing and data extraction simpler compared to XML. But
XML is more self descriptive than JSON and so there are some applications where XML retains an
advantage. For example, most word processors store documents internally using XML rather than
JSON.

Application Programming Interface (API)

Till now, we have discussed how to exchange data between applications using HTTP, XML and
JSON. The next step is to understand API. Application Programming Interface defines and
documents the contracts between the applications. When we use an API, generally one program
makes a set of services available for use by other applications and publishes the APIs (i.e., the
“rules”) that must be followed to access the services provided by the program.

When we begin to build our programs where the functionality of our program includes access to
services provided by other programs, we call the approach a Service-Oriented Architecture(SOA).
A SOA approach is one where our overall application makes use of

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the services of other applications. A non-SOA approach is where the application is a single stand-
alone application which contains all of the code necessary to implement the application.

Consider an example of SOA: Through a single website, we can book flight tickets and hotels. The
data related to hotels is not stored in the airline servers. Instead, airline servers contact the services
on hotel servers and retrieve the data from there and present it to the user. When the user agrees to
make a hotel reservation using the airline site, the airline site uses another web service on the hotel
systems to actually make the reservation. Similarly, to reach airport, we may book a cab through a
cab rental service. And when it comes time to charge your credit card for the whole transaction, still
other computers become involved in the process. This process is depicted in Figure 5.3.

Figure 5.3 Server Oriented Architecture

SOA has following major advantages:

 we always maintain only one copy of data (this is particularly important for things like hotel
reservations where we do not want to over-commit)
 the owners of the data can set the rules about the use of their data.

With these advantages, an SOA system must be carefully designed to have good performance and
meet the user’s needs. When an application makes a set of services in its API available over the web,
then it is called as web services.

Google Geocoding Web Service

Google has a very good web service which allows anybody to use their large database of geographic
information. We can submit a geographic search string like “Rajarajeshwari Nagar” to their
geocoding API. Then Google returns the location details of the string submitted.

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The following program asks the user to provide the name of a location to be searched for. Then, it
will call Google geocoding API and extracts the information from the returned JSON.

import urllib.request, urllib.parse, urllib.error import json

serviceurl = 'http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?' address = input('Enter location: ')

if len(address) < 1: exit()

url = serviceurl + urllib.parse.urlencode({'address': address}) print('Retrieving', url)

uh = urllib.request.urlopen(url) data =
uh.read().decode()
print('Retrieved', len(data), 'characters')

try:
js = json.loads(data)
except:
js = None

if not js or 'status' not in js or js['status'] != 'OK': print('==== Failure To Retrieve ====')

print(data)

print(json.dumps(js, indent=4))
lat = js["results"][0]["geometry"]["location"]["lat"]
lng = js["results"][0]["geometry"]["location"]["lng"] print('lat', lat, 'lng', lng)
location = js['results'][0]['formatted_address'] print(location)

(Students are advised to run the above program and check the output, which will contain
several lines of Google geographical data).

The above program retrieves the search string and then encodes it. This encoded string along with
Google API link is treated as a URL to fetch the data from the internet. The data retrieved from the
internet will be now passed to JSON to put it in JSON object format. If the input string (which must
be an existing geographical location like Channasandra, Malleshwaram etc!!) cannot be located by
Google API either due to bad internet or due to unknown location, we just display the message as
‘Failure to Retrieve’. If Google successfully identifies the location, then we will dump that data in
JSON object. Then, using

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indexing on JSON (as JSON will be in the form of dictionary), we can retrieve the location address,
longitude, latitude etc.

Security and API Usage

Public APIs can be used by anyone without any problem. But, if the API is set up by some private
vendor, then one must have API key to use that API. If API key is available, then it can be included
as a part of POST method or as a parameter on the URL while calling API.

Sometimes, vendor wants more security and expects the user to provide cryptographically signed
messages using shared keys and secrets. The most common protocol used in the internet for signing
requests is OAuth.

As the Twitter API became increasingly valuable, Twitter went from an open and public API to an
API that required the use of OAuth signatures on each API request. But, there are still a number of
convenient and free OAuth libraries so you can avoid writing an OAuth implementation from scratch
by reading the specification. These libraries are of varying complexity and have varying degrees of
richness. The OAuth web site has information about various OAuth libraries.

USING DATABASES AND SQL

A structured set of data stored in a permanent storage is called as database. Most of the databases are
organized like a dictionary – that is, they map keys to values. Unlike dictionaries, databases can store
huge set of data as they reside on permanent storage like hard disk of the computer.

There are many database management softwares like Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server,
PostgreSQL, SQLite etc. They are designed to insert and retrieve data very fast, however big the
dataset is. Database software builds indexes as data is added to the database so as to provider quicker
access to particular entry.

In this course of study, SQLite is used because it is already built into Python. SQLite is a C library
that provides a lightweight disk-based database that doesn’t require a separate server process and
allows accessing the database using a non-standard variant of the SQL query language. SQLite is
designed to be embedded into other applications to provide database support within the application.
For example, the Firefox browser also uses the SQLite database internally. SQLite is well suited to
some of the data manipulation problems in Informatics such as the Twitter spidering application etc.

Database Concepts
For the first look, database seems to be a spreadsheet consisting of multiple sheets. The primary data
structures in a database are tables, rows and columns. In a relational database terminology, tables,
rows and columns are referred as relation, tuple and attribute respectively. Typical structure of a
database table is as shown below. Each table may consist of n number of attributes and m number of
tuples (or records). Every tuple gives the information about one individual. Every cell(i, j) in the
table indicates value of jth attribute for ith tuple.

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Attribute1 Attribute2 ……………… Attribute_n

Tuple1 V11 V12 ……………… V1n
Tuple2 V21 V22 ……………… V2n
………….. ……… ……. ……………… ……….
…………. ………… ………. …………….. ………..
Tuple_m Vm1 Vm2 …………….. Vmn

Consider the problem of storing details of students in a database table. The format may look like –

Student1 RollNo Name DoB Marks

Student2 1 Ram 22/10/2001 82.5
………….. 2 Shyam 20/12/2000 81.3
…………. ……… ……. ……………… ……….
Student_m ………… ………. …………….. ………..
………….. ………. ……………. …………
Thus, table columns indicate the type of information to be stored, and table rows gives record
pertaining to every student. We can create one more table say addressTable consisting of attributes
like DoorNo, StreetName, Locality, City, PinCode. To relate this table with a respective student
stored in studentTable, we need to store RollNo also in addressTable (Note that, RollNo will be
unique for every student, and hence there won’t be any confusion). Thus, there is a relationship
between two tables in a single database. There are softwares that can maintain proper relationships
between multiple tables in a single database and are known as Relational Database Management
Systems (RDBMS). The detailed discussion on RDBMS is out of the scope of this study.

Structured Query Language (SQL) Summary

To perform operations on databases, one should use structured query language. SQL is a standard
language for storing, manipulating and retrieving data in databases. Irrespective of RDBMS software
(like Oracle, MySQL, MS Access, SQLite etc) being used, the syntax of SQL remains the same.
The usage of SQL commands may vary from one RDBMS to the other and there may be little
syntactical difference. Also, when we are using some programming language like Python as a front-
end to perform database applications, the way we embed SQL commands inside the program source-
code is as per the syntax of respective programming language. Still, the underlying SQL commands
remain the same. Hence, it is essential to understand basic commands of SQL.

There are some clauses like FROM, WHERE, ORDER BY, INNER JOIN etc. that are used with
SQL commands, which we will study in a due course. The following table gives few of the SQL
commands.

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Command Meaning
CREATE DATABASE creates a new database

ALTER DATABASE modifies a database

CREATE TABLE creates a new table

ALTER TABLE modifies a table

DROP TABLE deletes a table

SELECT extracts data from a database
INSERT INTO inserts new data into a database

UPDATE updates data in a database

DELETE deletes data from a database

As mentioned earlier, every RDBMS has its own way of storing the data in tables. Each of RDBMS
uses its own set of data types for the attribute values to be used. SQLite uses the data types as
mentioned in the following table –

Data Type Description

NULL The value is a NULL value.

INTEGER The value is a signed integer, stored in 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, or 8 bytes depending on

the magnitude of the value.

REAL The value is a floating point value, stored as an 8-byte floating point number

TEXT The value is a text string, stored using the database encoding (UTF- 8,
UTF-16BE or UTF-16LE)
BLOB The value is a blob (Binary Large Object) of data, stored exactly as it was
input

Note that, SQL commands are case-insensitive. But, it is a common practice to write commands and
clauses in uppercase alphabets just to differentiate them from table name and attribute names.

Now, let us see some of the examples to understand the usage of SQL statements –
 CREATE TABLE Tracks (title TEXT, plays INTEGER)

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This command creates a table called as Tracks with the attributes title and plays
where title can store data of type TEXT and playscan store data of type INTEGER.

 INSERT INTO Tracks (title, plays) VALUES ('My Way', 15)

This command inserts one record into the table Tracks where values for the attributes
title and plays are ‘My Way’ and 15 respectively.

 SELECT * FROM Tracks

Retrieves all the records from the table Tracks

 SELECT * FROM Tracks WHERE title = 'My Way’

Retrieves the records from the table Tracks having the value of attribute
title as ‘My Way’

 SELECT title, plays FROM Tracks ORDER BY title

The values of attributes title and plays are retrieved from the table
Tracks with the records ordered in ascending order of title.

 UPDATE Tracks SET plays = 16 WHERE title = 'My Way‘

Whenever we would like to modify the value of any particular attribute in the table,
we can use UPDATE command. Here, the value of attribute plays is assigned to a
new value for the record having value of title as ‘My Way’.

 DELETE FROM Tracks WHERE title = 'My Way'

A particular record can be deleted from the table using DELETE command. Here, the
record with value of attribute title as ‘My Way’ is deleted from the table Tracks.

Database Browser for SQLite

Many of the operations on SQLite database files can be easily done with the help of software called
Database Browser for SQLite which is freely available from:
http://sqlitebrowser.org/

Using this browser, one can easily create tables, insert data, edit data, or run simple SQL queries on
the data in the database. This database browser is similar to a text editor when working with text
files. When you want to do one or very few operations on a text file, you can just open it in a text
editor and make the changes you want. When you have many changes that you need to do to a text
file, often you will write a simple Python program. You will find the same pattern when working
with databases. You will do simple operations in the database manager and more complex operations
will be most conveniently done in Python.

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Creating a Database Table

When we try to create a database table, we must specify the names of table columns and the type of
data to be stored in those columns. When the database software knows the type of data in each
column, it can choose the most efficient way to store and look up the data based on the type of data.
Here is the simple code to create a database file and a table named Tracks with two columns in the
database:

Ex1.
import sqlite3
conn = sqlite3.connect('music.sqlite') cur = conn.cursor()

cur.execute('DROP TABLE IF EXISTS Tracks')

cur.execute('CREATE TABLE Tracks (title TEXT, plays INTEGER)') conn.close()

The connect() method of sqlite3 makes a “connection” to the database stored in the file music.sqlite3
in the current directory. If the file does not exist, it will be created. Sometimes, the database is stored
on a different database server from the server on which we are running our program. But, all the
examples that we consider here will be local file in the current working directory of Python code.

A cursor() is like a file handle that we can use to perform operations on the data stored in the
database. Calling cursor() is very similar conceptually to calling open() when dealing with text files.
Hence, once we get a cursor, we can execute the commands on the contents of database using
execute()method.

Figure 5.4 A Database Cursor

In the above program, we are trying to remove the database table Tracks, if at all it existed in the
current working directory. The DROP TABLE command deletes the table along with all its columns
and rows. This procedure will help to avoid a possible error of trying to create a table with same
name. Then, we are creating a table with name Tracks which has two columns viz. title, which can
take TEXT type data and plays, which can

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take INTEGER type data. Once our job with the database is over, we need to close the connection
using close() method.

In the previous example, we have just created a table, but not inserted any records into it. So,
consider below given program, which will create a table and then inserts two rows and finally delete
records based on some condition.

Ex2.
import sqlite3

conn = sqlite3.connect('music.sqlite') cur = conn.cursor()

cur.execute('DROP TABLE IF EXISTS Tracks')
cur.execute('CREATE TABLE Tracks (title TEXT, plays INTEGER)')

cur.execute(“INSERT INTO Tracks (title, plays) VALUES

('Thunderstruck', 20)”)
cur.execute(“INSERT INTO Tracks (title, plays) VALUES (?, ?)”,
('My Way', 15))
conn.commit()

print('Tracks:')
cur.execute('SELECT title, plays FROM Tracks') for row in cur:
print(row)

cur.execute('DELETE FROM Tracks WHERE plays < 100') cur.close()

In the above program, we are inserting first record with the SQL command –

“INSERT INTO Tracks (title, plays) VALUES('Thunderstruck', 20)”

Note that, execute() requires SQL command to be in string format. But, if the value to be store in the
table is also a string (TEXT type), then there may be a conflict of string representation using quotes.
Hence, in this example, the entire SQL is mentioned within double-quotes and the value to be
inserted in single quotes. If we would like to use either single quote or double quote everywhere,
then we need to use escape-sequences like \’ or \”.

While inserting second row in a table, SQL statement is used with a little different syntax –

“INSERT INTO Tracks (title, plays) VALUES (?, ?)”,('My Way', 15)

Here, the question mark acts as a place-holder for particular value. This type of syntax is useful
when we would like to pass user-input values into database table.

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After inserting two rows, we must use commit() method to store the inserted records permanently on
the database table. If this method is not applied, then the insertion (or any other statement execution)
will be temporary and will affect only the current run of the program.

Later, we use SELECT command to retrieve the data from the table and then use for-loop to display
all records. When data is retrieved from database using SELECT command, the cursor object gets
those data as a list of records. Hence, we can use for-loop on the cursor object. Finally, we have used
a DELETE command to delete all the records WHERE plays is less than 100.

Let us consider few more examples –

Ex3.

import sqlite3
from sqlite3 import Error

def create_connection():
""" create a database connection to a database that resides in the memory
"""
try:
conn = sqlite3.connect(':memory:') print("SQLite
Version:",sqlite3.version)
except Error as e: print(e)
finally:
conn.close()

create_connection()

Few points about above program:

 Whenever we try to establish a connection with database, there is a possibility of error due to
non-existing database, authentication issues etc. So, it is always better to put the code for
connection inside try-except block.
 While developing real time projects, we may need to create database connection and close it
every now-and-then. Instead of writing the code for it repeatedly, it is better to write a
separate function for establishing connection and call that function whenever and wherever
required.
 If we give the term :memory: as an argument to connect() method, then the further operations
(like table creation, insertion into tables etc) will be on memory (RAM) of the computer, but
not on the hard disk.

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Ex4. Write a program to create a Student database with a table consisting of student name and age.
Read n records from the user and insert them into database. Write queries to display all records and
to display the students whose age is 20.

import sqlite3 conn=sqlite3.connect('StudentDB.db') c=conn.cursor()

c.execute('CREATE TABLE tblStudent(name text, age Integer)')

n=int(input(“Enter number of records:”)) for i in range(n):

nm=input("Enter Name:")
ag=int(input("Enter age:"))
c.execute("INSERT INTO tblStudent VALUES(?,?)",(nm,ag))

conn.commit()
c.execute("select * from tblStudent ") print(c.fetchall())

c.execute("select * from tblStudent where age=20") print(c.fetchall())

conn.close()

In the above program we take a for-loop to get user-input for student’s name and age. These data are
inserted into the table. Observe the question mark acting as a placeholder for user-input variables.
Later we use a method fetchall() that is used to display all the records form the table in the form of a
list of tuples. Here, each tuple is one record from the table.

Three Kinds of Keys

Sometimes, we need to build a data model by putting our data into multiple linked tables and linking
the rows of those tables using some keys. There are three types of keys used in database model:
 A logical key is a key that the “real world” might use to look up a row. It defines the
relationship between primary keys and foreign keys. Most of the times, a UNIQUE constraint
is added to a logical key. Since the logical key is how we look up a row from the outside
world, it makes little sense to allow multiple rows with the same value in the table.
 A primary key is usually a number that is assigned automatically by the database. It generally
has no meaning outside the program and is only used to link rows from different tables
together. When we want to look up a row in a table, usually searching for the row using the
primary key is the fastest way to find the row. Since primary keys are integer numbers, they
take up very little storage and can be compared or sorted very quickly.

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 A foreign key is usually a number that points to the primary key of an associated row in a
different table.

Consider a table consisting of student details like RollNo, name, age, semester and address as shown
below –

RollNo Name Age Sem Address

1 Ram 29 6 Bangalore
2 Shyam 21 8 Mysore
3 Vanita 19 4 Sirsi
4 Kriti 20 6 Tumkur

In this table, RollNo can be considered as a primary key because it is unique for every student in that
table. Consider another table that is used for storing marks of students in all the three tests as below
–

RollNo Sem M1 M2 M3
1 6 34 45 42.5
2 6 42.3 44 25
3 4 38 44 41.5
4 6 39.4 43 40
2 8 37 42 41

To save the memory, this table can have just RollNo and marks in all the tests. There is no need to
store the information like name, age etc of the students as these information can be retrieved from
first table. Now, RollNo is treated as a foreign key in the second table.

Basic Data Modeling

The relational database management system (RDBMS) has the power of linking multiple tables. The
act of deciding how to break up your application data into multiple tables and establishing the
relationships between the tables is called data modeling. The design document that shows the tables
and their relationships is called a data model. Data modeling is a relatively sophisticated skill. The
data modeling is based on the concept of database normalization which has certain set of rules. In a
raw-sense, we can mention one of the basic rules as never put the same string data in the database
more than once. If we need the data more than once, we create a numeric key (primary key) for the
data and reference the actual data using this key. This is because string requires more space on the
disk compared to integer, and data retrieval (by comparing) using strings is difficult compared to that
with integer.

Consider the example of Student database discussed in Section 5.3.5. We can create a table using
following SQL command –

CREATE TABLE tblStudent

(RollNo INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, Name TEXT, age INTEGER, sem INTEGER, address
TEXT)

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Here, RollNo is a primary key and by default it will be unique in one table. Now, another take can be
created as –

CREATE TABLE tblMarks

(RollNo INTEGER, sem INTEGER, m1 REAL, m2 REAL, m3 REAL,
UNIQUE(RollNo,sem))

Now, in the tblMarks consisting of marks of 3 tests of all the students, RollNo and sem are together
unique. Because, in one semester, only one student can be there having a particular RollNo. Whereas
in another semester, same RollNo may be there.

Such types of relationships are established between various tables in RDBMS and that will help
better management of time and space.

Using JOIN to Retrieve Data

When we follow the rules of database normalization and have data separated into multiple tables,
linked together using primary and foreign keys, we need to be able to build a SELECT that
reassembles the data across the tables. SQL uses the JOIN clause to reconnect these tables. In the
JOIN clause you specify the fields that are used to reconnect the rows between the tables.

Consider the following program which creates two tables tblStudent and tblMarks as discussed in the
previous section. Few records are inserted into both the tables. Then we extract the marks of students
who are studying in 6th semester.

import sqlite3

conn=sqlite3.connect('StudentDB.db') c=conn.cursor()

c.execute('CREATE TABLE tblStudent

(RollNo INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, Name TEXT, age INTEGER, sem
INTEGER, address TEXT)')

c.execute('CREATE TABLE tblMarks

(RollNo INTEGER, sem INTEGER, m1 REAL, m2 REAL, m3 REAL,
UNIQUE(RollNo,sem))')

c.execute("INSERT INTO tblstudent VALUES(?,?,?,?,?)",

(1,'Ram',20,6,'Bangalore'))
c.execute("INSERT INTO tblstudent VALUES(?,?,?,?,?)",
(2,'Shyam',21,8,'Mysore'))
c.execute("INSERT INTO tblstudent VALUES(?,?,?,?,?)",
(3,'Vanita',19,4,'Sirsi')) c.execute("INSERT
INTO tblstudent VALUES(?,?,?,?,?)",
(4,'Kriti',20,6,'Tumkur'))

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c.execute("INSERT INTO tblMarks VALUES(?,?,?,?,?)",(1,6,34,45,42.5))

c.execute("INSERT INTO tblMarks VALUES(?,?,?,?,?)",(2,6,42.3,44,25))
c.execute("INSERT INTO tblMarks VALUES(?,?,?,?,?)",(3,4,38,44,41.5))
c.execute("INSERT INTO tblMarks VALUES(?,?,?,?,?)",(4,6,39.4,43,40))
c.execute("INSERT INTO tblMarks VALUES(?,?,?,?,?)",(2,8,37,42,41))

conn.commit()

query="SELECT tblStudent.RollNo, tblStudent.Name, tblMarks.sem, tblMarks.m1,

tblMarks.m2, tblMarks.m3
FROM tblStudent JOIN tblMarks ON
tblStudent.sem = tblMarks.sem
AND tblStudent.RollNo =
tblMarks.RollNo WHERE tblStudent.sem=6"

c.execute(query) for row

in c:
print(row)

conn.close()

The output would be –

(1, 'Ram', 6, 34.0, 45.0, 42.5)
(4, 'Kriti', 6, 39.4, 43.0, 40.0)

The query joins two tables and extracts the records where RollNo and sem matches in both the tables,
and sem must be 6.

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