I have been in situations where I have been stuck for hours trying to understand why my code is not behaving in an expected way or is breaking at runtime. At times the bugs would be so silly that I literally wanna 🤯 and other times 🥺 , so yea it’s pretty normal to have bugs in your code while you are developing, but it’s not cool to have those bugs in production 😅. So in this post, I will be discussing ways in which you can debug your code in Python.
What is debugging?
Debugging is an action of removing issues or potential errors that can cause your code to crash or have unexpected behavior. So this post is about ways to debug code.
Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.
Here are some of the ways you can debug your code…
1. Adding print statements or logger to your code
Whenever writing code the best practice is to put enough print statements/loggers in the code so that if there are issues in they could be caught while the development process and get fixed. Here is an example of a piece of code with print statements
def my_fact(numb) -> int:
if numb is 1:
return numb
else:
return numb * my_fact(numb - 1)
if __name__ == '__main__':
num = input("Enter the number you want to calculate factorial for: ")
if isinstance(num, str):
try:
num = int(num)
except ValueError as e:
print("Unable to convert to integer, Exception: {}".format(e))
else:
print("Please input an Integer")
if isinstance(num, int):
factorial = my_fact(num)
print("Factorial is: {}".format(factorial))
Another way to debug is adding loggers, one awesome library in python is Loguru, here is the same code snippet with loguru.
from loguru import logger
def my_fact(numb) -> int:
if numb is 1:
return numb
else:
return numb * my_fact(numb - 1)
if __name__ == '__main__':
num = input("Enter the number you want to calculate factorial for: ")
if isinstance(num, str):
try:
num = int(num)
except ValueError as e:
logger.error("Unable to convert to integer, Exception: {}".format(e))
else:
logger.info("Please input an Integer")
if isinstance(num, int):
factorial = my_fact(num)
logger.debug("Factorial is: {}".format(factorial))
The advantage to adding a logger is that you would know where the code is breaking and also most of the logger libraries have different levels of logging:
- debug
- info
- error
2. Python PDB module
The pdb module in python helps debug the source code.
For python 2.7 and above there is a package called pdb which you can use for debugging your code. To use this you need to add import pdb; pdb.set_trace() to the code where you need to examine the variables and their value. This is just like adding a breakpoint to your code.
A breakpoint is used for suspending the program execution, post that you can examine the code line by line.
Following is the implementation of adding breakpoint:
...
if isinstance(num, int):
import pdb; pdb.set_trace()
factorial = my_fact(num)
Next, you need to run your code:
python factorial.py
Enter the number you want to calculate factorial for: 5
> /Users/dimplemathew/PycharmProjects/pythonProject2/factorial.py(23)<module>()
-> factorial = my_fact(num)
(Pdb)
You will see something similar to ☝️ in your terminal. It shows the path of the file along with the line number where the breakpoint is added.
(Pdb) p num
5
Next to know the value of the variables you can use ‘p <variable_name’> to get the value. If you are using python 3 and above you need not import pdb instead just add a breakpoint() where every you want in your source code. Below is the implementation:
...
if isinstance(num, int):
breakpoint()
factorial = my_fact(num)
For further read, here is the link to the documentation(https://docs.python.org/3/library/pdb.html)
3. IDE DEBUGGERS
I hope these techniques will help you guys debug better. Happy Coding
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