I was thinking I'd try to make my sqlite db connection a function instead of copy/pasting the ~6 lines needed to connect and execute a query all over the place. I'd like to make it versatile so I can use the same function for create/select/insert/etc...

Below is what I have tried. The 'INSERT' and 'CREATE TABLE' queries are working, but if I do a 'SELECT' query, how can I work with the values it fetches outside of the function?
Usually I'd like to print the values it fetches and also do other things with them.

When I do it like below I get an error

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\steini\Desktop\py\database\test3.py", line 15, in <module>
for row in connection('testdb45.db', "select * from users"):
ProgrammingError: Cannot operate on a closed database.

So I guess the connection needs to be open so I can get the values from the cursor, but I need to close it so the file isn't always locked.

Here's my testing code:

import sqlite3

def connection (db, arg):
    conn = sqlite3.connect(db)
    conn.execute('pragma foreign_keys = on')
    cur = conn.cursor()
    cur.execute(arg)
    conn.commit()
    conn.close()
    return cur

connection('testdb.db', "create table users ('user', 'email')")
connection('testdb.db', "insert into users ('user', 'email') values ('joey', 'foo@bar')")
for row in connection('testdb45.db', "select * from users"):
    print row

How can I make this work?