issue_comments

Good points @jthielen.

Here's another suggestion:

• Treat as two separate problems (1) inline display of duck array metadata and (2) inline preview of array values. This would let Xarray taking care of formatting the values (using format_array_flat, which won't need to be in public API), but this would require Xarray to know whether the duck array is lazy or not.

• For inline display of duck array metadata, only show the _repr_inline_ of the top-layer (do not cascade _repr_inline_ of nested duck arrays). It's the responsibility of the top-layer library (e.g., Pint) to show metadata about the layers beyond.

• Dask (duck) arrays (if they could be identified as-is https://github.com/dask/dask/issues/6385?) probably deserve their own treatment in the xarray variable repr too, because xarray exposes specific API for them (e.g., .compute()) and because we cannot trust that all duck array libraries will properly handle Dask duck arrays in their inline repr. I think that just a one-character symbol of some kind would be enough (similarly to * for coordinates with an index).

Thinking more about it, I find the current repr (both text and html) already quite dense and I'm wondering if this couldn't be the opportunity to clean it a little bit.

For example, the inline array repr would be only for showing the values (if directly accessible, otherwise ...) and a very compact description of the underlying array objects (assuming that we could easily retrieve that information), e.g.,

my_var (x) float64 ... [p-u-d-s-c]

For any additional data/metadata, we have collapsed sections for the html repr (toggleable using the icons). For the text repr, we could have additional display options like display_var_attributes=False, display_array_summary=False, display_data_repr=False, etc.

It might be rather opposite to what you want to achieve @keewis, but I think a cleaner repr with hidden sections (or turned-off display options) by default would make sense if 80% of Xarray users are dealing mostly with numpy arrays.

(sorry my comment is slightly off-topic).

It's tricky for the text repr, but for the html repr some sort of horizontal accordion would be nice, although I'd be concerned adding more complexity to the current repr (regarding both UI and HTML/CSS code).

Alternatively, we could "simply" reuse the dropdown sections of each variable and add one or more sections next to the attribute and data repr ones (with their own expand icon). This could give a bit more space for fancy things and this would leave the inline space for only the highest nested array object and/or values preview if available.