Python MySQLdb TypeError: not all arguments converted during string formatting

You can try this code:

cur.execute( "SELECT * FROM records WHERE email LIKE %s", (search,) )

You can see the documentation

Instead of this:

cur.execute( "SELECT * FROM records WHERE email LIKE '%s'", search )

Try this:

cur.execute( "SELECT * FROM records WHERE email LIKE %s", [search] )

See the MySQLdb documentation. The reasoning is that execute's second parameter represents a list of the objects to be converted, because you could have an arbitrary number of objects in a parameterized query. In this case, you have only one, but it still needs to be an iterable (a tuple instead of a list would also be fine).