Question

Does python have some undefined variable / debug mode which will output a notice/warning?

PHP allows you to modify the error_reporting to turn on notice warnings which mean doing

<?php
echo $foo;

will throw an “Undefined variable foo on line 2…….

does python have something similar?

I had a bug where I was doing

db.connect

instead of

db.connect()

and I was hoping python would throw a
undefined variable connect…

can you bump up the error reporting level or similar in python?

Answer 1

Python complains about undefined variables, without any adjustments to its warning system:

h[1] >>> print x
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'x' is not defined

In your case db.connect actually has a value, namely a function object. So your connection isn’t undefined.

h[1] >>> def hello(): pass
     ... 
h[1] >>> x = hello
h[1] >>> print x
<function hello at 0x100461c80>