unix - Pipe output from shell command to a python script

Question

I want to run a mysql command and set the output of that to be a variable in my python script.

Here is the shell command I'm trying to run:

$ mysql my_database --html -e "select * from limbs" | ./script.py

Here is the python script:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys

def hello(variable):
    print variable

How would I accept the variable in the python script and have it print the output?

Answer 1

You need to read from stdin to retrieve the data in the python script e.g.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys

def hello(variable):
    print variable

data = sys.stdin.read()
hello(data)

If all you want to do here is grab some data from a mysql database and then manipulate it with Python I would skip piping it into the script and just use the Python MySql module to do the SQL query.