Execute sqlite3 "dot" commands from Python or register collation in command line utility

You can call dot commands from Python using the subprocess module, which basically invokes a shell. If you need to use multiple dot commands, you can pass them as separate shell arguments - using a semicolon to separate them won't work.

import subprocess
subprocess.call(["sqlite3", "xxx.db", 
  ".mode tabs", 
  ".import file.tsv table_name"])

You can load new collating sequences and functions using load_extension() built-in SQLite function or .load command in command line shell for SQLite. Obviously, extensions shold be written in C.

And you can not call dot-commands from python, because dot-commands are specific to the command line shell tool.

The .import command in the sqlite shell is a builtin command. It's processed by the shell program, not the SQL engine, so you can't execute it like an SQL statement.

Reading code for SQLite's shell.c, it seems that .import is simply a loop, reading lines from the data file, splitting on the separator, and passing the fields as parameter values to a prepared INSERT statement. So you should be able to mimic the behavior of .import with Python code easily.

I tested the following with Python 2.6:

import sqlite3
import csv

conn = sqlite3.connect(':memory:')

conn.execute('create table mytable (col1 text, col2 text, col3 text)')

csvReader = csv.reader(open('mydata.csv'), delimiter=',', quotechar='"')

for row in csvReader:
        conn.execute('insert into mytable (col1, col2, col3) values (?, ?, ?)', row)

cur = conn.cursor()
cur.execute('select * from mytable')
print cur.fetchall()