I tend to agree now with my friend’s recent observation that google cloud documentation is a wreck and doesn’t provide proper examples for some of the basic things in its documentation sdk.

I needed to use the function TableReference. When you search for it you will land in the following page — Class TableReference where it’s not clear on how to use

So here is an example code I was using —

from google.cloud import bigquery

# Create a client object.
client = bigquery.Client()

# Get the project ID.
project_id = "my-project-id"

# Get the dataset ID.
dataset_id = "my-dataset"

# Get the table ID.
table_id = "my-table"

# Create a table reference.
table_ref = bigquery.TableReference(
    project_id=project_id,
    dataset_id=dataset_id,
    table_id=table_id,
)

print(table_ref)

This is the error I was getting

TypeError: TableReference.__init__() takes 3 positional arguments but 4 were given

Fix to be applied is pretty simple.

# Create a table reference using from_string
table_ref = bigquery.TableReference.from_string("{project_id}.{dataset_id}.{table_id}")