issue_comments

Another idea would be to simply add the variables attrs to the current __repr__ (i.e no need for a new function).

I'm getting slightly off-topic, but I am also in favor or removing the data values from the repr altogether, as it creates problems and is not really useful (I think). See also: https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/1044 https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/820

and other issues mentioning repr : https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue%20is%3Aopen%20repr

pandas already has a (rarely used) DataFrame.info() method, which is a little different: ``` In [3]: df = pd.DataFrame({'x': [1, 2, 3], 'y': ['a', 'b', 'c'], 'z': [-1, -2, -3]})

In [4]: df Out[4]: x y z 0 1 a -1 1 2 b -2 2 3 c -3

In [5]: df.info() <class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'> RangeIndex: 3 entries, 0 to 2 Data columns (total 3 columns): x 3 non-null int64 y 3 non-null object z 3 non-null int64 dtypes: int64(2), object(1) memory usage: 152.0+ bytes `` (most of that information is already inDataset.repr`)

I might pick a name that including a specific reference to attributes for this, maybe attr_info()?

I think something like this would be quite useful. This is most applicable to the Dataset and I can see a new method for printing this info. What would we call that method?

• Pandas has a df.head and I think this is technically information stored in the header of the netcdf file, so ds.head() could work but pandas prints out some number of rows as well.
• Maybe just ds.info() which is simple enough and self-explanatory, also no confusion with df.head() which returns a DataFrame.
• I don't really like the *dump* alternatives since they will be pretty close to the pickle.dump.

I don't think anything like this currently exists.

I agree that some way to conveniently summarize attributes would be nice to have. See also #244.