Reading DBF files with pyodbc

Question

In a project, I need to extract data from a Visual FoxPro database, which is
stored in dbf files, y have a data directory with 539 files I need to take
into account, each file represents a database table, so I’ve been doing some
testing and my code goes like this:

import pyodbc

connection = pyodbc.connect("Driver={Microsoft Visual FoxPro Driver};SourceType=DBF;SourceDB=P:\\Data;Exclusive=No;Collate=Machine;NULL=No;DELETED=Yes")
tables = connection.cursor().tables()
for _ in tables:
    print _

this prints only 15 tables, with no obvious pattern, always the same 15
tables, I thought this was because the rest of the tables were empty but I
checked and it some of the tables (dbf files) on the list are empty too, then,
I thought it was a permission issue, but all the files have the same
permission structure, so, I don’t know what’s happening here.

Any light??

EDIT: It is not truccating the output, the tables it list are not the 15
first or anything like that

Answer 1

I DID IT!!!!

There where several problems with what I was doing so, here I come with what I
did to solve it (after implementing it the first time with Ethan Furman’s
solution)

The first thing was a driver problem, it turns out that the Windows’ DBF
drivers are 32 bits programs and runs on a 64 bits operating system, so, I had
installed Python-amd64 and that was the first problem, so I installed a 32bit
Python.

The second issue was a library/file issue, according to
this,
dbf files in VFP > 7 are diferent, so my pyodbc library won’t read them
correctly, so I tried some OLE-DB libraries with no success and I decided to
to it from scratch.

Googling for a while took me to
this
post which finally gave me a light on this

Basically, what I did was the following:

import win32com.client

conn = win32com.client.Dispatch('ADODB.Connection')
db = 'C:\\Profit\\profit_a\\ARMM'
dsn = 'Provider=VFPOLEDB.1;Data Source=%s' % db
conn.Open(dsn)

cmd = win32com.client.Dispatch('ADODB.Command')
cmd.ActiveConnection = conn
cmd.CommandText = "Select * from factura, reng_fac where factura.fact_num = reng_fac.fact_num AND factura.fact_num = 6099;"

rs, total = cmd.Execute() # This returns a tuple: (<RecordSet>, number_of_records)

while total:
    for x in xrange(rs.Fields.Count):
        print '%s --> %s' % (rs.Fields.item(x).Name, rs.Fields.item(x).Value)
    rs.MoveNext()        #<- Extra indent
    total = total - 1

And it gave me 20 records which I checked with DBFCommander and were OK

First, you need to install pywin32
extensions (32bits)
and the Visual FoxPro OLE-DB Provider (only available for 32bits), in my case for
VFP 9.0

Also, it’s good to read de ADO
Documentation at the w3c website

This worked for me. Thank you very much to those who replied