The title says it all. When you are working R and using RStudio, its really easy and simple to debug something by dropping a browser() call anywhere in your code and seeing what goes wrong. Is there a way to do that with Python? I'm slowly getting very sick of print statement debugging.
It looks like you are looking for ipdb
The basic usage is to set:
import ipdb
ipdb.set_trace()
in your code to explore; this will take you right to that part of code, so you can explore all the variables at that point.
For your specific use case: "Would it be a setting in my Console so that it Opens pdb right before something crashes" (a comment to another answer), you can use context manager: launch_ipdb_on_exception
For example:
from ipdb import launch_ipdb_on_exception
def silly():
my_list = [1,2,3]
for i in xrange(4):
print my_list[i]
if __name__ == "__main__":
with launch_ipdb_on_exception():
silly()
Will take you to ipdb session:
5 for i in xrange(4):
----> 6 print my_list[i]
7
ipdb> i
3