Debugging ========= When working with the API, chances are you'll stumble upon bugs, get stuck and start wondering how to continue. Nothing to actually worry about -- that's normal -- and luckily for you, Pyrogram provides some commodities to help you in this. Caveman Debugging ----------------- *The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.* -- Brian Kernighan, "Unix for Beginners" (1979) Adding ``print()`` statements in crucial parts of your code is by far the most ancient, yet efficient technique for debugging programs, especially considering the concurrent nature of the framework itself. Pyrogram goodness in this respect comes with the fact that any object can be nicely printed just by calling ``print(obj)``, thus giving to you an insight of all its inner details. Consider the following code: .. code-block:: python dan = app.get_users("haskell") print(dan) # User This will show a JSON representation of the object returned by :meth:`~pyrogram.Client.get_users`, which is a :class:`~pyrogram.User` instance, in this case. The output on your terminal will be something similar to this: .. code-block:: json { "_": "pyrogram.User", "id": 23122162, "is_self": false, "is_contact": false, "is_mutual_contact": false, "is_deleted": false, "is_bot": false, "is_verified": false, "is_restricted": false, "is_support": false, "is_scam": false, "first_name": "Dan", "status": { "_": "pyrogram.UserStatus", "user_id": 23122162, "recently": true }, "username": "haskell", "language_code": "en", "photo": { "_": "pyrogram.ChatPhoto", "small_file_id": "AQADBAAD8tBgAQAEJjCxGgAEo5IBAAIC", "big_file_id": "AQADBAAD8tBgAQAEJjCxGgAEpZIBAAEBAg" } } As you've probably guessed already, Pyrogram objects can be nested. That's how compound data are built, and nesting keeps going until we are left with base data types only, such as ``str``, ``int``, ``bool``, etc. Accessing Attributes -------------------- Even though you see a JSON output, it doesn't mean we are dealing with dictionaries; in fact, all Pyrogram types are full-fledged Python objects and the correct way to access any attribute of them is by using the dot notation ``.``: .. code-block:: python dan_photo = dan.photo print(dan_photo) # ChatPhoto .. code-block:: json { "_": "pyrogram.ChatPhoto", "small_file_id": "AQADBAAD8tBgAQAEJjCxGgAEo5IBAAIC", "big_file_id": "AQADBAAD8tBgAQAEJjCxGgAEpZIBAAEBAg" } However, the bracket notation ``[]`` is also supported, but its usage is discouraged: .. warning:: Bracket notation in Python is not commonly used for getting/setting object attributes. While it works for Pyrogram objects, it might not work for anything else and you should not rely on this. .. code-block:: python dan_photo_big = dan["photo"]["big_file_id"] print(dan_photo_big) # str .. code-block:: text AQADBAAD8tBgAQAEJjCxGgAEpZIBAAEBAg Checking an Object's Type ------------------------- Another thing worth talking about is how to tell and check for an object's type. As you noticed already, when printing an object you'll see the special attribute ``"_"``. This is just a visual thing useful to show humans the object type, but doesn't really exist anywhere; any attempt in accessing it will lead to an error. The correct way to get the object type is by using the built-in function ``type()``: .. code-block:: python dan_status = dan.status print(type(dan_status)) .. code-block:: text And to check if an object is an instance of a given class, you use the built-in function ``isinstance()``: .. code-block:: python :name: this-py from pyrogram import UserStatus dan_status = dan.status print(isinstance(dan_status, UserStatus)) .. code-block:: text True .. raw:: html