Variable Explorer

The variable explorer shows the globals() namespace contents (i.e. all global object references) of the current console: it supports both the Console (Python interpreter running in a remote process) and the Internal Console.

_images/variableexplorer1.png

The following screenshots show some interesting features such as editing lists, strings, dictionaries, NumPy arrays, or plotting/showing NumPy arrays data.

_images/listeditor.png _images/texteditor.png _images/dicteditor.png _images/arrayeditor.png _images/variableexplorer-plot.png _images/variableexplorer-imshow.png

The default variable explorer configuration allows to browse global variables without slowing the console even with very large NumPy arrays, lists or dictionaries. The trick is to truncate values, to hide collection contents (i.e. showing ‘<list @ address>’ instead of list contents) and to not show mininum and maximum values for NumPy arrays (see context menu options on the screenshot at the top of this page).

However, most of the time, choosing the opposite options won’t have too much effect on console’s performance:

_images/variableexplorer2.png

Supported types

The variable explorer can’t show all types of objects. The ones currently supported are:

  1. Pandas DataFrames and TimeSeries
  2. NumPy arrays and matrices
  3. PIL/Pillow images
  4. datetime dates
  5. Integers
  6. Floats
  7. Complex numbers
  8. Lists
  9. Dictionaries
  10. Tuples
  11. Strings

Related plugins: