I use this bit of code to feed some data i have parsed from a web page to a mysql database

c=db.cursor()
c.executemany(
"""INSERT INTO data (SID, Time, Value1, Level1, Value2, Level2, Value3, Level3, Value4, Level4, Value5, Level5, ObsDate)
VALUES (%s, %s, %s, %s, %s, %s, %s, %s, %s, %s, %s, %s, %s)""",
clean_data
)

The parsed data looks like this (there are several hundred such lines)

clean_data = [(161,00:00:00,8.19,1,4.46,4,7.87,4,6.54,null,4.45,6,2010-04-12),(162,00:00:00,7.55,1,9.52,1,1.90,1,4.76,null,0.14,1,2010-04-12),(164,00:00:00,8.01,1,8.09,1,0,null,8.49,null,0.20,2,2010-04-12),(166,00:00:00,8.30,1,4.77,4,10.99,5,9.11,null,0.36,2,2010-04-12)]

if i hard code the data as above mySQL accepts my request (except for some quibbles about formatting)

but if the variable clean_data is instead defined as the result of the parsing code, like this:

cleaner = [("""  $!!'""", ')]'),('  $!!', ') etc etc]
def processThis(str,lst):
    for find, replace in lst:
        str = str.replace(find, replace)
    return str
clean_data = processThis(data,cleaner)

then i get the dreaded "TypeError: not enough arguments for format string"

After playing with formatting options for a few hours (I am very new to this) I am confused... what is the difference between the hard coded data and the result of the processThis function as fas as mySQL is concerned?

Any idea greatly appreciated...