debugging - Printing stack trace and continuing after error occurs in R

Question

I'm writing some R code that calls other code that may fail. If it does, I want to print a stack trace (to track down what went wrong), then carry on regardless. However, the traceback() function only provides information about uncaught exceptions. I can get the result I want via a rather complex, natty construction involving tryCatch and dump.frames, but is there not an easier way of doing this?

Answer 1

I wrote this code about a week ago to help me track down errors that come primarily from non-interactive R sessions. It's still a little rough, but it prints a stack trace and continues on. Let me know if this is useful, I'd be interested in how you would make this more informative. I'm also open into cleaner ways to get this information.

options(warn = 2, keep.source = TRUE, error = quote({
  # Debugging in R
  #   http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/murdoch/software/debuggingR/index.shtml
  #
  # Post-mortem debugging
  #   http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/murdoch/software/debuggingR/pmd.shtml
  #
  # Relation functions:
  #   dump.frames
  #   recover
  # >>limitedLabels  (formatting of the dump with source/line numbers)
  #   sys.frame (and associated)
  #   traceback
  #   geterrmessage
  #
  # Output based on the debugger function definition.

  # TODO: setup option for dumping to a file (?)
  # Set `to.file` argument to write this to a file for post-mortem debugging    
  dump.frames()  # writes to last.dump
  n <- length(last.dump)
  if (n > 0) {
    calls <- names(last.dump)
    cat("Environment:
", file = stderr())
    cat(paste0("  ", seq_len(n), ": ", calls), sep = "
", file = stderr())
    cat("
", file = stderr())
  }

  if (!interactive()) q()
}))

PS: you might not want warn=2 (warnings converted to errors)