It can be tough trying to debug classes, inherited classes, class methods etc in general. Here’s 2 useful debugging utility functions i love to use to sort through the mess.

1. Printing attributes and values

def print_attr(obj):
    """
    Traverses the items in the object's dictionary and prints each attribute name and its corresponding value.
    """
    for attr in obj.__dict__:
        print attr, getattr(obj, attr)

As explained in docstring, function print_attr() takes in an object and spits out each of its attributes and its corresponding value.

The built-in function getattr() takes an object and an attribute name(as string) and returns the attribute’s value.

2. Find defining class

def find_defining_class(obj, method_name):
"""
Uses method resolution method(MRO) to get the list of class objects(types) that will be searched for methods.
Return the class to which the method 'method_name' belong to.
"""
for origin in type(obj).mro():
    if method_name in origin.__dict__:
        return origin

Useful if your class belongs to a long chain of super classes and you are trying to find out which class does a particular method belong to. This method works because of Method Resolution Order rule in python.

Here’s an example:

>>> hand = Hand()
>>> print find_defining_class(hand, 'shuffle)
<class 'Card.Deck'>

So the shuffle method for this Hang object is the one in Deck.

Hope this 2 utility debugging functions can save you time traversing those pesky bugs. Please share your secret debugging functions too!

Happy debugging! Ok fine, that’s a fallacy…Don’t die debugging!