friendly-traceback 0.3.142

Friendlier tracebacks in any language.

friendly

Created with Python beginners in mind, but also useful for experienced users, friendly replaces standard tracebacks by something easier to understand, translatable into various languages. Currently, the information provided by friendly is only available in two languages: English and French.

The additional information provided by friendly includes why() a certain exception occurred, what() it means, exactly where() it occurred including the value of relevant variables, and more.

The screenshot above was taken on Windows. In some other operating systems you might need to type python3 instead of python: friendly requires Python version 3.6 or newer.

friendly used to be called friendly-traceback.

Installation

python -m pip install friendly

This needs to be done from a terminal. In the command shown above, python refers to whatever you need to type to invoke your favourite Python interpreter. It could be python, python3, py -3.8, etc.

For some special cases, including using a specialized editor like Mu that has its own way of installing Python packages, please consult the documentation.

Documentation

The documentation is available by clicking here.

Example

The following example illustrates the information that can be provided by friendly.

    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<friendly-console:5>", line 1, in <module>
        test()
      File "<friendly-console:4>", line 2, in test
        a = cost(pi)
    NameError: name 'cost' is not defined

        Did you mean `cos`?

    A `NameError` exception indicates that a variable or
    function name is not known to Python.
    Most often, this is because there is a spelling mistake.
    However, sometimes it is because the name is used
    before being defined or given a value.

    In your program, `cost` is an unknown name.
    Instead of writing `cost`, perhaps you meant one of the following:
    *   Global scope: `cos`, `cosh`, `acos`

    Execution stopped on line 1 of file `'<friendly-console:5>'`.

    -->1: test()

            test: <function test>

    Exception raised on line 2 of file `'<friendly-console:4>'`.

       1: def test():
    -->2:    a = cost(pi)
                 ^^^^

            global pi: 3.141592653589793

Projects using friendly

The following sites or projects use friendly:

• https://futurecoder.io/
• https://www.hackinscience.org/

Feel free to file an issue to add your site or project if it uses friendly.

Contribute

Contribute by making suggestions for improvements, pointing out mistakes either in the documentation or in the information provided by friendly, or finding bugs.

If you speak a language other than English or French and feel ambitious, you might want to work on translations into your own language.

License: MIT

Some of the ideas were adopted from DidYouMean-Python (aka BetterErrorMessages) by Sylvain Desodt, a project that is also using the MIT license.

Code of Conduct

We agree with the goals behind the creation of the Python Community Code of Conduct. Contributors to this project, including those filing or commenting on an issue, are expected to do the same.

JetBrains support

We graciously acknowledge the support of JetBrains which enables us to use the professional version of PyCharm for developing friendly.