First off, welcome to Quantopian!

Would it be possible to attach your algo (ie an algo backtest) to your post? That will make it much clearer to debug.

However, this can be problematic if you can't even get a backtest to run. Sort of a 'Catch-22'.

One workaround for this is to 'comment out' your entire code. Put 3 single or double quotes at the very top and very bottom of your code. This will turn it all into a comment (ensure your code doesn't include triple quotes anywhere or this won't work). Then, at the very end put an empty initialize function. This is the single function required to generate a backtest. Run the backtest (it won't do anything) and attach it to your post. That will allow others to more easily see your code and potentially help debug it.

Comment out and add the initialize function something like this

# Put triple single or double quotes at the very top of your code  
'''
this is where you code is....

'''
# Put triple single or double quotes at the very bottom of your code  
# Your entire code should now appear in red as a comment  
# Now add the two lines below

def initialize(context):  
    pass

Try that. With the code attached to a post others can more easily help debug. Good luck.

Hi Dan,

Yeah I wanted to do that, but that whole 'Catch 22' business made it impossible. I ended up going line by line and imputing everything into an already functioning code with a similar structure. Turns out that sentiment is not playing nice for whatever reason and can just be excluded for other factors.
Thanks for the advice though! Will definately be using that in the future when debugging!