I'm working on a project right now that catalogs data from a star simulation of mine. To do so I'm loading all the data into a sqlite database. It's working pretty well, but I've decided to add a lot more flexibility, efficiency, and usability to my db. I plan on later adding planetoids to the simulation, and wanted to have a table for each star. This way I wouldn't have to query a table of 20m some planetoids for the 1-4k in each solar system.
I've been told using string constructors is bad because it leaves me vulnerable to a SQL injection attack. While that isn't a big deal here as I'm the only person with access to these dbs, I would like to follow best practices.
Currently I'm doing this:
cursor.execute("CREATE TABLE StarFrame"+self.name+" (etc etc)")
This works, but I would like to do something more like:
cursor.execute("CREATE TABLE StarFrame(?) (etc etc)",self.name)
though I understand that this would probably be impossible. though I would settle for something like
cursor.execute("CREATE TABLE (?) (etc etc)",self.name)
Is it possible to use a variable as your table name without having to use string constructors to do so?
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'