[Enhancement request] Ability to expand variables

[caleb15]

In the call and return from locals there is data that is just presented as text, when ideally it should be presented as a dictionary you can expand to easily see the contents of.

For example, I see stuff like "response": "<HttpResponse status_code=403, \"text/html; charset=utf-8\">". This is fine, where it becomes a problem is longer ones where you have to scroll to the right.

Currently I would classify this as just a minor want.

[Almenon]

This is the open-source handle of OP. I'm the maintainer of the AREPL extension, which has some serialization code that could be of interest to you.

I have a similar problem of needing to pass variables from python to Typescript. To solve it I use jsonpickle to serialize (pickle) the objects into JSON. I pass the results to my extension, where I use JSON visualization library renderJson to provide an expandable output. I would actually recommend using a different visualization library or writing your own, however. Renderjson is nice but it's not in Typescript and the last update was in 2018.

The pickler: https://github.com/Almenon/AREPL-backend/blob/master/python/arepl_pickler.py

I would be happy to hop on a call to go over it or AREPL if it's of interest.

[Almenon]

Forgot to mention why I use jsonpickle. It's really good at being able to pickle arbitrary objects. For example, one of your users reported a failure with hashid in #33. Jsonpickle is able to handle this just fine.

The downside is you have to pickle a lot of variables, so I don't know if jsonpickle would be fast enough for your users.