Is it possible to automatically break into the debugger when a exception is thrown?

Question

If ones catches an exception outside of the function it is originally thrown, ones loses access to the local stack. As a result one cannot inspect the values of the variables th

Answer 1

You don't want to break on every exception; idiomatic Python code uses exceptions heavily (EAFP) so you'd be continually breaking in unrelated code.

Instead, use pdb post-mortem: import pdb; pdb.pm(). This uses sys.last_traceback to inspect the stack including the locals at the throw point.