Trouble with a simple query PyODBC

Question

I want to query the following:

The attribute Unknown Hrs is Yes if the employee works on at least one project with NULL hours, and No otherwise.

And I do this by first making a list, theList containing all relevant social security numbers and consequently:

for i in theList:

unknown_hours=process_query("SELECT Distinct COUNT(*) FROM Works_On WHERE ISNULL(Hours) AND ESSN='%s'" %i) 

temp.append(unknown_hours)

the trouble is that I get answers like 1L or 0L and I need them to be integers (for an algorithm). Any thoughts?

Regards Cenderze

• Brad: int_unknown_hours = int(unknown_hours)?
• Cenderze: Thank you! I always tend to think outside the easy answers for some reason, but this helped me!

Answer 1

1L is just the long integer representation of the integer value 1:

>> type(1L)
<type 'long'>
>>> long(1)
1L
>>> int(1L)
1

Convert in Python:

int(unknown_hours)

Or in the database layer:

SELECT Distinct CAST(COUNT(*) AS UNSIGNED) FROM Works_On WHERE ISNULL(Hours) AND ESSN='%s'

• Cenderze: Thank you! This is my first laboration in python so I forgot to mention that I used a list and int() was not possible. However with your answer I knew what to look for and eventually googled up the map function, so thank you! =)
• Bryan: Consider using a list comprehension for the integer conversion instead of map(). Comparison of the two approaches here.