Is it possible to set a breakpoint on assert in eclipse?

Question

I have a large project consisting of several thousand classes. Today I discovered that for some input, a different result is calculated when running with assertions enabled.

Since the assertion itself doesn't throw an AssertionError (I already have a breakpoint on that one), this means that somewhere hidden in the code is an assertion statement that has an unwanted side effect. The problem is I have no clue which of my >100 assertions is causing the problem.

Since assert is not a method but a keywordin Java, I am at a loss on how to set a breakpoint that will be hit each time assert is called.

Possible workarounds I have found:

• commenting out assertions one by one and running the program to finally find the culprit.
• run my test case with a code coverage tool like eclEmma to filter out some of the assertion statements.
• enabling assertions only for certain packages to narrow down the number of assertions that might be the cause.
• doing a search and replace (using regular expressions) to replace assert by a utility method where I can place a breakpoint.

Nonetheless, I would like to know if anyone knows of a way to break on assert, even if the condition evaluates to true.

Answer 1

Goto Run->Add Java Exception Breakpoint Type 'AssertionError' in search box Choose java.lang.AssertionError and OK

Now Eclipse will suspend on assert