Is there any way to make a python program start an interactive debugger, like what import pdb; pdb.set_trace()
instead of actually throwing an exception?
I know the difficulty of making this work, but it would be much more valuable than a huge stack trace after which I have to use to figure out where to insert breakpoints and then restart the program to debug it. I know that simply making the debugger start instead of throwing an exception would not make sense because any exception can be caught at a level or another, so if I could just select a list of exceptions for which an interactive debug session would start instead of them being thrown (because I know the exceptions in this list would really be "errors" and no meaningful program behavior could follow afterwards)…
I've heard that Common Lisp has something like this, but I don't know how it works exactly, just that "true lispers" praise it a lot…
Best Answer
The simplest way is to wrap your entire code inside a
try
block like this:There is a more complicated solution which uses
sys.excepthook
to override the handling of uncaught exceptions, as described in this recipe:The above code should be included in a file called
sitecustomize.py
insidesite-packages
directory, which is automatically imported by python. The debugger is only started when python is run in non-interactive mode.