🐥 The beauty of debugging in Elixir when using dbg()

If you are like me and often use pipes in your Elixir code, you might have found that debugging is sometimes a hassle.

I often add IO.inspect calls in the pipeline to see what the values are.

"Elixir is cool!"
|> String.trim_trailing("!")
|> IO.inspect()
|> String.split()
|> IO.inspect()
|> List.first()
|> IO.inspect()

Running this will output:

"Elixir is cool"
["Elixir", "is", "cool"]
"Elixir"
"Elixir"

There is actually a way better and nicer way to do it by using the dbg/2 function:

"Elixir is cool!"
|> String.trim_trailing("!")
|> String.split()
|> List.first()
|> dbg()

Executhing this will give you:

[iex:10: (file)]
"Elixir is cool!" #=> "Elixir is cool!"
|> String.trim_trailing("!") #=> "Elixir is cool"
|> String.split() #=> ["Elixir", "is", "cool"]
|> List.first() #=> "Elixir"

"Elixir"

As you can see, it will print values at every step of the pipeline.

As always, you can read more about it in the documentation.