Debugging ruby inside a loop

Question

I'm trying to debug a ruby application where I loop through a bunch of days and check against my employees to see whether they worked that day. The code I am working on looks like the following:

def search_for_worked(day)
  # debugger
  workers = employees.select do |employee|
    employee.worked?(day)
  end
  if workers.length < 1
    raise Error

end

I know my employee.worked? method is doing something it shouldn't be and I would like to step into it with the params that are causing the problem. However the search_for_worked method is being called ~100 times before it is getting to the day where it is failing.

I can call catch Error but it halts after the method so I can't step into it.

Whats the best way to debug logic errors if I only know its doing something wrong after I've already called it?

Have you considered Pry? github.com/pry/pry It will let you step into an irb session at your if workers.length < 1. You can then exit irb and it will pick up the program where it left off. — Beartech
– Beartech, Commented Feb 2, 2014 at 4:49
@Beartech yeah I wanted to use pry but inside of the employee.worked?(day) when it was messing up — Darcys22
– Darcys22, Commented Feb 2, 2014 at 6:22
Darcy, you might consider writing the body of this method as employees.any? {|employee| employee.worked?(day)}. That way, the method would return true if any employees worked; else nil. If you have if(search_for_worked(day))..., returning nil has the same effect as returning false. — Cary Swoveland
– Cary Swoveland, Commented Feb 2, 2014 at 8:34

John Naegle · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-02 04:58:20Z

1

I often use something like this:

debugger if <condition I didn't expect>

or

debugger if $foo.nil?

The second will be hit the first time through the loop, then I set $foo (a global) to something and continue.

answered Feb 2, 2014 at 4:58

John Naegle

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1 Comment

Darcys22 Over a year ago

Yeah ended up doing that. Except I rewrote the select block afterwards so I could step into it :/

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