Question

I am debugging some code and I want to find out when a particular dictionary is accessed. Well, it’s actually a class that subclasses dict and implements a couple extra features. Anyway, what I would like to do is subclass dict myself and override __getitem__ and __setitem__ to produce some debugging output. Right now, I have

class DictWatch(dict):
    def __init__(self, *args):
        dict.__init__(self, args)

    def __getitem__(self, key):
        val = dict.__getitem__(self, key)
        log.info("GET %s['%s'] = %s" % str(dict.get(self, 'name_label')), str(key), str(val)))
        return val

    def __setitem__(self, key, val):
        log.info("SET %s['%s'] = %s" % str(dict.get(self, 'name_label')), str(key), str(val)))
        dict.__setitem__(self, key, val)

'name_label' is a key which will eventually be set that I want to use to identify the output. I have then changed the class I am instrumenting to subclass DictWatch instead of dict and changed the call to the superconstructor. Still, nothing seems to be happening. I thought I was being clever, but I wonder if I should be going a different direction.

Answer 1

What you’re doing should absolutely work. I tested out your class, and aside from a missing opening parenthesis in your log statements, it works just fine. There are only two things I can think of. First, is the output of your log statement set correctly? You might need to put a logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG) at the top of your script.

Second, __getitem__ and __setitem__ are only called during [] accesses. So make sure you only access DictWatch via d[key], rather than d.get() and d.set()