dumping the list of tables in a sqlite database

I was poking through an iPhone backup for a friend, trying to recover the text message log after he accidentally deleted a bunch of messages. I found that the text messages were stored in a SQLite database. It also turned out that the backup was before the time that the messages were deleted, so most of the deleted messages were intact.

I decided to try and dump the whole database to the simple grid format discussed previously. First I needed a list of tables to dump, and I decided to make this an exercise in learning some Python database API.

Here is a Python program to dump the list of tables in a SQLite database.

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys, sqlite3

if len(sys.argv) != 2:
  print "expected database file name"
  sys.exit()
file = sys.argv[1]

conn = sqlite3.connect(file)
c = conn.cursor()

c.execute('select name from sqlite_master where type=\'table\'')
for table in c:
  print table[0]

conn.close()