Python Debugging With pdb: Summary

Thanks for the course. Pdb is much like the Perl debugger. I have one problem though - can’t get it working with Robot. If I launch the Robot executable with Pdb, I can specify a breakpoint (at least it is not rejected) - but then pdb doesn’t seem to stop at it at all. If tends to stop where there is a Pause (Robot keyword) call in the code, and at that point all the scope that is available is the Pause keyword scope. So any variables I want to print are only from the Pause Robot keyword - completely useless. Do you have any suggestions how to make it work with Robot?

Thanks that was great … Love the extra pdb++ .. until I came to the pdbpp decorator @pdb.hideframe and got an error. (I’m running on Windows with Python 3.8.5 in PyCharm)

import pdb

def log_in(username):
    pdb.set_trace()
    if username != "steve":
        greet(username)
    else:
        print("steve is not welcome here")

@pdb.hideframe
def greet(name):
    print(f"Hello {name}!")

user_input = input("Enter your name: ")
log_in(user_input)

I get the following error when trying to run my program in the command line:

(venv) C:\Users\YvonneW\python\my_debugging>python example6.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "example6.py", line 14, in <module>
    def greet(name):
  File "C:\Users\YvonneW\python\my_debugging\venv\lib\site-packages\pdb.py", line 1266,
in hideframe
    c = types.CodeType(
TypeError: an integer is required (got type bytes)

Did I miss something?

@Yvonne Wilmot Hmm, that code looks right to me. Judging by the stacktrace, it looks that’s an issue with PDB++. I’ve seen this TypeError a lot with modules that are incompatible with Python 3.8. Try running the script with 3.7 and see if that works.

Very informative; thanks!

Excellent tutorial! Easy to follow, clearly explained. Thank you!

I have my company code running on docker containers. will it work there as well? also, whats the best way of printing values? ( or, I guess that we need to use logger.info(f”and then, our {value}”)

@tobenary What you need in this case is running a remote debugger. The easiest way would be to use an IDE like PyCharm, which takes care of the details. However, if you wanted to use PDB in the command-line, then that’s also possible. Google the phrase “pdb docker remote debugging”.

pdb++ is a handy little extra…

I often check the type of variable value, is there a way to check the type of variable? Most of the time I don’t have write mode on files, I would prefer using python3 -m pdb fileName.py. can someone share video line on this please.

Thank you for the tutorial, I’ve learned a lot from it :)