Printing literal text of an argument

[Reinhold Birkenfeld]

Rex Eastbourne wrote:
> Thanks. I adapted it a bit:
> 
> def debug(foo):
>     print foo, 'is:'
>     exec('pprint.pprint(' + foo + ')')
> 
> But I'm getting "NameError: name 'foo' is not defined," since foo is
> not defined in this scope. (The function works beautifully when I'm
> dealing with global variables, which is very rarely).
> 
> Any way around this?

Eh, yes, but it's getting uglier...

def debug(foo):
    print foo, 'is:'
    frame = sys._getframe(-1)
    exec 'pprint.pprint(%s)' % foo, frame.f_globals, frame.f_locals

Untested.

Reinhold