I have a tab delimeted file that I want to convert into a mysql table. there are 25 tab delimeted fields in the text file. I can get the values in when I construct the SQL statement word by word and get each value individually stated in the VALUES part but when I try to get the list as a whole it does not work. Here is the code. I couldn't figure it out. Any ideas? lines=open(path, "r").readlines() for line in lines[1:]: linex=line.strip().split("\t") linex.insert(0,'sometextindex') try: cursor.execute('INSERT INTO variants VALUES(%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s,%s)',linex) except: print 'line number=',a,linex