Adding message to assert

Question

Hallo!

I\'m looking for a way to add custom messages to assert statements. I found this questions Add custom messages in assert? but the message is static there. I w

Answer 1

A better alternative is to teach the debugger to stop on assert when it fails, then you could examine not only the x value but any other information including call stack. Perhaps, this is what you are really looking for. Sample implementation is mentioned here Ways to show your co-programmers that some methods are not yet implemented in a class when programming in C++

Answer 2

Yes, this is possible.

To enable expression like better_assert((0 < x) && (x < 10), std::string("x was ") + myToString(x));, we are supposed to have a corresponding macro in a form of

#define better_assert(EXPRESSION, ... ) ((EXPRESSION) ? \
(void)0 : print_assertion(std::cerr, \
"Assertion failure: ", #EXPRESSION, " in File: ", __FILE__, \ 
" in Line: ", __LINE__ __VA_OPT__(,) __VA_ARGS__))

in which print_assertion is a proxy function to do the assertion. When the EXPRESSION is evaluated false, all the debug information, the __VA_ARGS__, will be dumped to std::cerr. This function takes arbitrary numbers of arguments, thus we should implement a variadic templated function:

template< typename... Args >
void print_assertion(std::ostream& out, Args&&... args)
{
    out.precision( 20 );
    if constexpr( debug_mode )
    {
        (out << ... << args) << std::endl;
        abort();
    }
}

In the previous implementation, the expression (out << ... << args) << std::endl; make use of fold expression in C++17 (https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/fold); the constant expression debug_mode is related to the compilation options passed, which is can be defined as

#ifdef NDEBUG
    constexpr std::uint_least64_t debug_mode = 0;
#else
    constexpr std::uint_least64_t debug_mode = 1;
#endif

It also worth mentioning that the expression if constexpr( debug_mode ) makes use of constexpr if (https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/if) imported since C++17.

To wrap everything up, we have:

#ifdef NDEBUG
    constexpr std::uint_least64_t debug_mode = 0;
#else
    constexpr std::uint_least64_t debug_mode = 1;
#endif

template< typename... Args >
void print_assertion(std::ostream& out, Args&&... args)
{
    out.precision( 20 );
    if constexpr( debug_mode )
    {
        (out << ... << args) << std::endl;
        abort();
    }
}
#ifdef better_assert
#undef better_assert
#endif
#define better_assert(EXPRESSION, ... ) ((EXPRESSION) ? (void)0 : print_assertion(std::cerr, "Assertion failure: ",  #EXPRESSION, " in File: ", __FILE__, " in Line: ",  __LINE__ __VA_OPT__(,) __VA_ARGS__))

A typical test case demonstrating its usage can be:

double const a = 3.14159265358979;
double const b = 2.0 * std::asin( 1.0 );
better_assert( a==b, " a is supposed to be equal to b, but now a = ", a, " and b = ", b );

This will produce something error message like:

Assertion failure: a==b in File: test.cc in Line: 9 a is supposed to be equal to b, but now a = 3.1415926535897900074 and b = 3.141592653589793116
[1]    8414 abort (core dumped)  ./test

And the full source code is available in this repo: https://github.com/fengwang/better_assert