How to read datetime back from sqlite as a datetime instead of string in Python?

If you declare your column with a type of timestamp, you're in clover:

>>> db = sqlite3.connect(':memory:', detect_types=sqlite3.PARSE_DECLTYPES)>>> c = db.cursor()>>> c.execute('create table foo (bar integer, baz timestamp)')<sqlite3.Cursor object at 0x40fc50>>>> c.execute('insert into foo values(?, ?)', (23, datetime.datetime.now()))<sqlite3.Cursor object at 0x40fc50>>>> c.execute('select * from foo')<sqlite3.Cursor object at 0x40fc50>>>> c.fetchall()[(23, datetime.datetime(2009, 12, 1, 19, 31, 1, 40113))]

See? both int (for a column declared integer) and datetime (for a column declared timestamp) survive the round-trip with the type intact.

It turns out that sqlite3 can do this and it's even documented, kind of - but it's pretty easy to miss or misunderstand.

What I had to do is:

• Pass the sqlite3.PARSE_COLNAMES option in the .connect() call, eg.

conn = sqlite3.connect(dbFilePath, detect_types=sqlite3.PARSE_DECLTYPES|sqlite3.PARSE_COLNAMES)

• Put the type I wanted into the query - and for datetime, it's not actually "datetime", but "timestamp":

  sql = 'SELECT jobid, startedTime as "[timestamp]" FROM job'cursor = conn.cursor()try:    cursor.execute(sql)    return cursor.fetchall()finally:    cursor.close()

If I pass in "datetime" instead it's silently ignored and I still get a string back. Same if I omit the quotes.

Note: In Python3, I had to change the SQL to something like:

SELECT jobid, startedTime as "st [timestamp]" FROM job

(I had to explicitly name the column.)