Finance, problem with database

Question

Although I already did Pset7 finance I wanted to learn something new with python and flask, I find it really interesting but I have the feeling on many occasions that the syntax is little documented, specifically the requests to the database, if I request a value with SELECT using db.execute it seems that I am being returned a dictionary:

diner =  db.execute("SELECT cash FROM users WHERE id = :id", id = session["user_id"])

where diner is {'cash': 10000}

then if I want to access the actual value of the current cash, I have to do something like:

available = diner[0]['cash']

then available = 10000 my question is, should not that be enough available = diner['cash']? I do not understand why the first bracket [0] (well I'm a little new in python)

Answer 1

A select statement can always potentially return multiple results, either expected, or because there may be a problem with the data (corrupt database, entry error, etc.), so the process always returns an array, even if it is an array of only one element.

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