Improve object inspection

[laike9m]

• [ ] Show absolute line number
• [ ] Show class name for instances
• [ ] Diffrenciate between tuple, list, set (needs to record the original type)
• [ ] Deal with '{"py/type": "test_cellvar.test_closure.<locals>.Foo"}', which represents a Python class.
• [ ] Numpy objects
• [ ] Pandas objects
• [x] Show string with quotes
• [x] Fix: re.Match object is null in Js. ( As it turns out, jsonpickle only serializes an object's __dict__. A re.Match object has no __dict__, only attributes defined by descriptors, so was serialized to null. )
• [x] Pass truncated repr to FE to use as the tooltip text.
• [x] Repr truncated on Linux (https://github.com/alexmojaki/cheap_repr/issues/13, https://github.com/alexmojaki/cheap_repr/issues/15)

Conext and Solutions

Right now we use

jsonpickle.encode(python_object, unpicklable=False)

to convert a Python object to JSON. Many information is lost in the conversion. If we use unpicklable=False, theoretically it's lossless, but we need to handle the extra information (like methods, scopes, etc).

See:

• https://stackoverflow.com/q/2398078/2142577
• https://jsonpickle.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api.html#jsonpickle-high-level-api

Fall back to repr is not a bad choice.

On the Js side, we could use eval to generate a more user-friendly output. So instead of a plain Js object, we could attach class information by

We can also hide the __proto__ attribute when logging: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11818091/hiding-the-proto-property-in-chromes-console