Well, here is a sort of slow approach. It can be modified for watching for local variable change (just by name). Here is how it works: we do sys.settrace and analyse the value of obj.attr each step. The tricky part is that we receive 'line' events (that some line was executed) before line is executed. So, when we notice that obj.attr has changed, we are already on the next line and we can’t get the previous line frame (because frames aren’t copied for each line, they are modified ). So on each line event I save traceback.format_stack to watcher.prev_st and if on the next call of trace_command value has changed, we print the saved stack trace to file. Saving traceback on each line is quite an expensive operation, so you’d have to set include keyword to a list of your projects directories (or just the root of your project) in order not to watch how other libraries are doing their stuff and waste cpu.
watcher.py
import traceback
class Watcher(object):
def __init__(self, obj=None, attr=None, log_file="log.txt", include=[], enabled=False):
"""
Debugger that watches for changes in object attributes
obj - object to be watched
attr - string, name of attribute
log_file - string, where to write output
include - list of strings, debug files only in these directories.
Set it to path of your project otherwise it will take long time
to run on big libraries import and usage.
"""
self.log_file=log_file
with open(self.log_file, 'wb'): pass
self.prev_st = None
self.include = [incl.replace('\\',"https://stackoverflow.com/") for incl in include]
if obj:
self.value = getattr(obj, attr)
self.obj = obj
self.attr = attr
self.enabled = enabled # Important, must be last line on __init__.
def __call__(self, *args, **kwargs):
kwargs['enabled'] = True
self.__init__(*args, **kwargs)
def check_condition(self):
tmp = getattr(self.obj, self.attr)
result = tmp != self.value
self.value = tmp
return result
def trace_command(self, frame, event, arg):
if event!='line' or not self.enabled:
return self.trace_command
if self.check_condition():
if self.prev_st:
with open(self.log_file, 'ab') as f:
print >>f, "Value of",self.obj,".",self.attr,"changed!"
print >>f,"###### Line:"
print >>f,''.join(self.prev_st)
if self.include:
fname = frame.f_code.co_filename.replace('\\',"https://stackoverflow.com/")
to_include = False
for incl in self.include:
if fname.startswith(incl):
to_include = True
break
if not to_include:
return self.trace_command
self.prev_st = traceback.format_stack(frame)
return self.trace_command
import sys
watcher = Watcher()
sys.settrace(watcher.trace_command)
testwatcher.py
from watcher import watcher
import numpy as np
import urllib2
class X(object):
def __init__(self, foo):
self.foo = foo
class Y(object):
def __init__(self, x):
self.xoo = x
def boom(self):
self.xoo.foo = "xoo foo!"
def main():
x = X(50)
watcher(x, 'foo', log_file="log.txt", include =['C:/Users/j/PycharmProjects/hello'])
x.foo = 500
x.goo = 300
y = Y(x)
y.boom()
arr = np.arange(0,100,0.1)
arr = arr**2
for i in xrange(3):
print 'a'
x.foo = i
for i in xrange(1):
i = i+1
main()