Making it Pythonic: create a sqlite3 database if it doesn't exist?

Question

I wrote a Python script which initializes an empty database if it doesn\'t exist.

import os

if not os.path.exists(\'Database\'):
    os.makedirs(\'Database\')
          


        

Answer 1

sqlite3.connect will attempt to create a database if it doesn't exist - so the only way to tell if one does exist is to try to open it and catch an IOError. Then to create a blank database, just connect using the sqlite3 module.

import sqlite3

try:
    open('idonotexist')
    print 'Database already exists!'
except IOError as e:
    if e.args == 2: # No such file or directory
        blank_db = sqlite3.connect('idontexist')
        print 'Blank database created'
    else: # permission denied or something else?
        print e

Of course, you may still have to do something with os.makedirs depending on if the structure already exists.