wormwood_3 wrote: >>> I've never used cgitb (and until now didn't know it existed!) >>> so can't comment. > > I had not heard of it until this week when I started working on CGI stuff, > but I have found it super handy! All you have to do it "import cgitb; > cgitb.enable()" and all tracebacks will get printed to nicely formatted HTML > output on the page you were trying to load. >
No doubt cgitb is a great tool for debugging cgi, but IIUC there are at least two instances when you will not get the pretty printed tracebacks in the browser when using cgitb. One is after, what I would call, a 'compile time' exception such as SyntaxError, in your python code. The other is when the python code runs without exception, but you have not separated the header and the document content with a newline. At least, I have found these to be true when using apache-cgi. Consider the following examples: #!/usr/bin/env python # raises a SyntaxError import cgi import cgitb; cgitb.enable() print "Content-type: text/html\n\n" # NOTE: purposeful misspelling of the print statement prin "<html><body><p>Hello, world!</p></body></html>" # the code above will produce a server 500, with apache # complaining about "premature end of script headers" ... #!/usr/bin/env python # good python, bad data import cgi import cgitb; cgitb.enable() print "Content-type: text/html" print "<html><body><p>Hello, world!</p></body></html>" # this is syntactically correct python, and will # run from the command line, but the html header # and html content have no separation, so apache # will consider all of it to be header info, resulting # in another server 500, "malformed header" As others have advised, under these circumstances you can review the apache error log (if your webhost allows it). Or roll-your-own logging equivalent, and run your cgi from a terminal to catch SyntaxErrors and the like. HTH, Marty _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
