multimedia display of Python objects

[stevengj]

If a Python object supports one or more of the IPython display methods, it would be good to automatically implement the corresponding writemime method so that the object displays graphically in IJulia (etc.).

Will also need to overload mimewritable for PyObject, since in this case checking method_exists(writemime, ...) won't be the correct thing to do.

See also this julia-dev discussion.

cc: @fperez, @JeffBezanson

[stevengj]

@fperez, how am I supposed to call the _repr_foo_ methods to get the corresponding data? I did:

using PyCall
@pyimport IPython.display as d
image = d.Image(url="http://127.0.0.1:8998/static/base/images/ipynblogo.png")

and then image[:_repr_png_](), but it returns nothing (i.e. Python None). The same thing happens in ipython with

import IPython.display as d
image = d.Image(url="http://127.0.0.1:8998/static/base/images/ipynblogo.png")
image._repr_png_()

What am I doing wrong?

[fperez]

Sorry, since that particular image comes from a remote URL, it is being rendered via html:

image._repr_html_()

produces

u'<img src="http://127.0.0.1:8888/static/base/images/ipynblogo.png"/>'

If you had an image coming from a file, it would then call _repr_png_:

In [1]: from IPython.display import Image

In [2]: a=Image('logo/logo.png')

In [3]: a._repr_png_()[:20]  # just show the first 20 characters
Out[3]: '\x89PNG\r\n\x1a\n\x00\x00\x00\rIHDR\x00\x00\x02\x08'

[stevengj]

Ah, great. display("text/html", image[:_repr_html_]()) works in IJulia.