MySQL Cookbook

Numbering Query Output Rows Sequentially

Problem

You want to number query output rows.

Solution

If you’re writing your own program, just add the row number yourself.

Discussion

A type of sequence that has nothing to do with the contents of your database is to number output rows from a query. When working within an API, you can number the rows by maintaining a counter and displaying its current value with each row’s contents. Here is an example in Python, using the insects table. It simply displays a numbered list of the distinct values in the origin column of the table:

cursor = conn.cursor ( )
cursor.execute ("SELECT DISTINCT origin FROM insect")
count = 1
while 1:
    row = cursor.fetchone ( )
    if row == None:
        break
    print count, row[0]
    count = count + 1
cursor.close ( )

See Also

The mysql program provides no explicit row-numbering facilities, although you can use a SQL variable to include an extra row number column in a query’s output. Another way to produce results that may be suitable for your purposes is to filter mysql output through another program that adds row numbers. These techniques are described in Recipe 1.27.