On 2011-06-07, Dun Peal <dunpea...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Jun 7, 1:23?pm, Neil Cerutti <ne...@norwich.edu> wrote: >> Use pdb. > > Neil, thanks for the tip; `pdb` is indeed a great debugging > tool. > > Still, it doesn't obviate the need for arguments in the stack > trace. For example: > > 1) Arguments in stack trace can expedite a debugging session, and even > obviate it completely: "Why did `foo()` fail? Oh, because it got `-1` > as its first argument, while I only coded for positive integers!". > 2) In some environments, it's very hard to recreate a rare exception > and analyze it with `pdb`. For instance, on a web application that > emails the stack traces of unhandled exceptions, it's very important > for that stack trace to be as informative as possible, since often > that's the only debugging feedback you will get. > > Hope that makes sense, D.
The locals should be in the frame object of the traceback. Here's a sketch of a decorator to print them out before your program bombs: import sys def report_arg_info(fn): def wrapper(*arg, **kw): try: return fn(*arg, **kw) except: frame = sys.exc_info()[2].tb_next.tb_frame print(frame.f_locals) raise return wrapper Use it as usual: @report_arg_info def my_func(bombs) raise ValueError You could log the local arguments instead. -- Neil Cerutti -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list