Variable table name in sqlite

I wouldn't separate the data into more than one table. If you create an index on the star column, you won't have any problem efficiently accessing the data.

Unfortunately, tables can't be the target of parameter substitution (I didn't find any definitive source, but I have seen it on a few web forums).

If you are worried about injection (you probably should be), you can write a function that cleans the string before passing it. Since you are looking for just a table name, you should be safe just accepting alphanumerics, stripping out all punctuation, such as )(][;, and whitespace. Basically, just keep A-Z a-z 0-9.

def scrub(table_name):
    return ''.join( chr for chr in table_name if chr.isalnum() )

scrub('); drop tables --')  # returns 'droptables'

For people searching for a way to make the table as a variable, I got this from another reply to same question here:

It said the following and it works. It's all quoted from mhawke:

You can't use parameter substitution for the table name. You need to add the table name to the query string yourself. Something like this:

query = 'SELECT * FROM {}'.format(table)
c.execute(query)

One thing to be mindful of is the source of the value for the table name. If that comes from an untrusted source, e.g. a user, then you need to validate the table name to avoid potential SQL injection attacks. One way might be to construct a parameterised query that looks up the table name from the DB catalogue:

import sqlite3

def exists_table(db, name):
    query = "SELECT 1 FROM sqlite_master WHERE type='table' and name = ?"
    return db.execute(query, (name,)).fetchone() is not None

Try with string formatting:

sql_cmd = '''CREATE TABLE {}(id, column1, column2, column2)'''.format(
            'table_name')
db.execute(sql_cmd)

Replace 'table_name' with your desire.