Daily Software Tips & Tricks
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Supercharge Your Python Debugging with f-String Self-Documenting Expressions
May 24, 2026
We've all written quick print statements like `print(f'user_id: {user_id}')` to debug our code. Python 3.8 introduced a brilliant shorthand that makes this much faster: just add an equals sign `=` inside the curly braces.
Writing `print(f'{user_id=}')` will automatically output both the variable name and its value, formatted as `user_id=123`. It even preserves whitespace and works with expressions, like `f'{user.get_name()=}'`. It's a tiny syntax trick that saves thousands of keystrokes over a project's lifetime.