Fetch live data from SQLite I'm writing a small Python script which needs to fetch live data from a database (I'm using SQLite 3 for now). I may reuse this function for a lot of scripts. Can this code be made better?

def fetch_database(database, table, filter_dict, case=None):
    """
    Takes filter parameter as a dict
    dict = {'column_name':['filter', 'filter2'], 'column_name2'=[], ..}
    case = wrap around the dictionary key(UPPER, LOWER, etc..), None
    database (with pathname ex: database.db
    table
    column = dict.keys()
    """

    conn = sqlite3.connect(database)
    c = conn.cursor()
    filter_dict = dict_format(filter_dict) # A separate function deletes empty keys from dictionary
    keys_list = filter_dict.keys()
    statement = 'SELECT * FROM ' + table
    if len(keys_list) &gt; 0:
        statement += ' WHERE '
        for keys in keys_list:
            if case == None:
                key = keys
            else:
                key = case + '(' + keys + ')'
            temp_data = filter_dict[keys]
            temp_size = len(temp_data)
            if keys_list.index(keys) != 0:
                statement += ' AND '
            if temp_size &gt; 0:
                for data in temp_data:
                    if temp_data.index(data) == 0:
                        statement += key + '="' + data + '"'
                    else:
                        statement += ' OR ' + key + '="' + data + '"'
    dataset = c.execute(statement)
    dataset = dataset.fetchall()
    return dataset
I'm surprised nobody mentioned the code being vulnerable to SQL injection attacks:



(XKCD source)

Using string formatting and string concatenation to construct SQL queries is, first of all, unsafe and also, fragile - you will have to handle the argument types, balancing and escaping quotes yourself manually.

Instead, you should parameterize your queries - this way, you are not only protected from SQL injections, but also let the database driver worry about the python-to-database type conversions, sample:

query = """
    SELECT column1 
    FROM table
    WHERE column2 = ?"""
cursor.execute(query, (data, ))


Note how parameters are passed in a separate argument to execute().

On the other hand, it feels like you may be reinventing the wheel in a certain way - please check if switching to an ORM like SQLAlchemy or peewee would help to avoid re-writing boilerplate code.