CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubypry
Greg
Greg

Reputation: 6649

How to call a method and immediately step into it

When, during a pry debug session, I want to inspect step-by-step execution of FooClass.new.foo I'd do this in pry console

$ FooClass.new.foo #this gives me path and line of the method
break /path/to/foo_class.rb:LINE_WHERE_FOO_IS_DEFINED
FooClass.new.foo

This works but I need to look for the path, line and it leaves a breakpoint I sometimes have to remove.

There's a faster way: 

break FooClass#foo
FooClass.new.foo

but it's still two steps, and the breakpoint stays.

Is there a way to do it in one command, like

step-into FooClass.new.foo

which would start a Pry subsession, enter the method execution and after it exits/finishes I'm back in the original session with no extra breakpoints left?

In other words: I'm in the middle of debugging, and see a method called few lines before (I can't step into it immediately). I don't want to put a binding.pry in the source (it may take a lot of time to start the debugging session again).

Upvotes: 7

Views: 1422

Answers (1)

Sam Winstanley
Sam Winstanley

Reputation: 99

The problem has hidden complexity. For instance, one thing you can do is:

pry Foo.new.foo
or 
Foo.new.foo.pry

This puts you into a binding on the return value of the function foo, but that is not what you want. It also shows there is complexity when your line of code Foo.new.foo runs, for a function to know what exactly to put a binding on.

So that's really the problem I feel; it would take understanding of the expression on the line to understand where to put a breakpoint. If you imagine it was working like the step function.

If your code Foo.new.foo was already a break point (e.g. you had a function with that code in and you put a breakpoint on a line like that) then you typed step, you would go into Foo.new Foo.initialize instance of foo foo.foo and so on. So, any code trying to do what you would like it to do would have a very hard time understanding where in the expression tree to stop and put your into pry.

This is why you have to tell pry where to stop using break in this context.

Upvotes: 1

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