196 – Drop into a debugger

The built-in function breakpoint stops your program and drops you into a debugger at the call site. For example, suppose you write this program, that defines two variables and calls breakpoint before the final call to print:

x = 73
y = 42

breakpoint()

print("Program finished")

By running this program, you’ll be dropped into a debugger between the variable assignments and the call to print. By default, breakpoint opens pdb:

-> breakpoint()
(Pdb) p x
73
(Pdb) p y
42
(Pdb) c
Program finished

When you’re done debugging, you can type c (short for continue) to exit the debugger and run the remainder of the program.