How to add conditions to a breakpoint

Swift version: 5.0

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

When you place a regular breakpoint on a line of code, Xcode will pause at that point when it’s reached. However, sometimes you need something a little more fine-grained: perhaps you want the breakpoint to be ignored the first few times it’s hit, or perhaps you want execution to be paused only when a certain condition is true.

Xcode has conditional breakpoints just for this purpose: when you place a breakpoint you can right-click on it and choose “Edit Breakpoint” to see customization options. Try changing the Ignore value from 0 to 10, which will make the line hit repeatedly until finally execution pauses; or try adding a condition inside the Condition field – myVar == 10 for example, which will pause only when myVar equals 10.

Conditional breakpoints look slightly different from regular breakpoints – look for the white arrow tip inside the main blue breakpoint arrow.

Available from iOS