Section 5.12 Debugging

If you are using a text editor to write your scripts, you might run into problems with spaces and tabs. The best way to avoid these problems is to use spaces exclusively (no tabs). Most text editors that know about Python do this by default, but some don’t.

Tabs and spaces are usually invisible, which makes them hard to debug, so try to find an editor that manages indentation for you.

Also, don’t forget to save your program before you run it. Some development environments do this automatically, but some don’t. In that case, the program you are looking at in the text editor is not the same as the program you are running.

Debugging can take a long time if you keep running the same incorrect program over and over!

Make sure that the code that you’re looking at is the same code that you’re running. If you’re not sure, put something like print("hello") at the beginning of the program and run it again. If you don’t see hello, you’re not running the right program!