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Sorry, I made a simple mistake.

Edited by james.lu.75491856
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  • Latest Post Latest Post by bumsfeld

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said it was a "simple mistake" and asked what — since no details were posted, here is a short, practical checklist and a few tiny examples of the kinds of "simple" Python issues that commonly cause confusion and how to locate them quickly.

  • Read the full traceback: note the exception type and the exact file/line number.
  • Inspect that line and the few lines above it for missing colons, wrong indentation, or stray tabs/spaces.
  • Reduce the failing code to a minimal snippet that still fails; run it in the REPL to isolate behaviour.
  • Use quick runtime debugging: prints/logging or python -m pdb script.py / import pdb; pdb.set_trace().
  • Run a linter (pylint, flake8) or use an editor with syntax checking to catch obvious typos or style problems.
  • Check Python version differences (print syntax, bytes vs str) and beware mutable default arguments.

Common tiny mistakes (examples):

# NameError from a typo
count = 3
print(coutn)   # NameError: name 'coutn' is not defined

# Fix
print(count)
# SyntaxError from a missing colon
if x == 1
    print("yes")

# Fix
if x == 1:
    print("yes")
# Surprising shared state from mutable default
def add(x, lst=[]):
    lst.append(x)
    return lst

# Fix
def add(x, lst=None):
    if lst is None:
        lst = []
    lst.append(x)
    return lst

A useful bug report includes the full traceback, the smallest reproducible code snippet, the Python version, and what was expected vs what happened. These make "simple mistakes" quick to spot and fix.

Member Avatar for bumsfeld

What was the mistake?

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