Strange behaviour of DataFrame html repr in qtconsole

[jorisvandenbossche]

Don't know if this is related to the new changes in 0.14 in the display of Dataframes or to #7180. But I find the following behaviour with 0.14 in Spyders IPython qtconsole:

To reproduce:

df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(2,20), columns=list('ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST'))
df['very_long_column_name'] = [1,2]
df['X'] = ['very_long_column_values', 'other_long_string']

• This seems not a very usefull behaviour to me?
  Should it truncate on width rather than number of columns?
• It is also not truncating (above dataframe has 22 columns, while default max_columns is 20 (and I checked the setting)), while it truncated correctly for the text repr.

Other strange thing, I saw this in the Spyder IPython console (which is an embedded qtconsole I think). However, when I tried this in a qtconsole, it gave me first the text repr instead of the html repr (although pd.options.display.notebook_html_repr was set to True), so I used HTML(df.to_html()) for the above picture (but the result is the same as in Spyder).

@bjonen

[jorisvandenbossche]

I checked it with 0.13.1 and 0.12.0, and there the issue is the same. So probably not related to the latest changes to the display.

[jreback]

related maybe to #7059

[bjonen]

In the notebook it looks fine http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gist/bjonen/06646fbe7f716a20f8fd

What's the import for HTML?

[jorisvandenbossche]

from IPython.display import HTML

The difference with the qtconsole is that there you don't have horizontal scrolling. So there should be more aggresive truncating based on the console width or something I think.

Now, what you see with HTML(df.to_html()) is a way to replicate it, because I think it is logical that it is not truncated here (as you explicitely converted it to HTML before printing it). So the fact about not truncating I said above, you can neglect that.
But apart from that, I get this behaviour in the Spyder's console with the default display.

[takluyver]

We (IPython) have changed the Qt console to not attempt to display HTML, because it does such a bad job on anything non-trivial. With IPython 3 installed, you should get the text representation instead of the HTML insider Spyder (since Spyder is just embedding the IPython Qt console).

IPython 3 is due for release late summer or early autumn, but the change should already be evident if you run a dev version of IPython.

[jorisvandenbossche]

When updating my spyder from 2.3.0 to 2.3.2, I noticed this issue is fixed (shows the text repr by default and no longer the HTML repr), so I think this can be closed.

Or is there something else we should fix at the pandas side?

[takluyver]

No, I think it's fine to close this.