feature request neo segment block contextual ascii art.

[Russell Jarvis]

Greetings neo developers/users,

I have been using neo with PyNN for the last few months, to retrieve neuron spike trains and analog signals. I am not sure if I represent the average user, but during this time, I became a bit disorientated about whether I was accessing a neo block, segment or analogue signal. I would often use dir on neo derived data types to check what methods were available, in order to get a contextual understanding of where I was in the nesting, but what is returned from dir is not always helpful. It would be cool if dir(block), dir(segment), dir(spike_trains) and dir(analogue_signal) returned some ascii art version of the diagram below, with a pointer to the position you currently occupy in that space.

http://neo.readthedocs.io/en/0.6/core.html

[Andrew Davison]

Hi Russell,

I'm afraid I'm having difficulty in understanding your use case, and the circumstances in which you don't know which object you're currently accessing. Isn't `type(obj)` sufficient?

Cheers,

Andrew

[Samuel Garcia]

Hi,
Julia already code some pretty repr so that in jupyter/ipython you can have usefull information.
It is not ascii art but it is already usefull to explore the tree.

Example
import neo
bl = neo.ExampleIO().read_block()
bl # <<< this is a pretty print in ipython

give

Block with 2 segments, 4 channel_indexes
name: 'Block #0'
annotations: {'block_extra_info': 'This is the block 0'}
# segments (N=2)
0: Segment with 1 analogsignals, 1 epochs, 1 events, 3 spiketrains
   name: 'Seg #0 Block #0'
   annotations: {'seg_extra_info': 'This is the seg 0 of block 0'}
   # analogsignals (N=1)
   0: AnalogSignal with 16 channels of length 100000; units uV; datatype float32
      name: 'Channel bundle (ch0,ch1,ch2,ch3,ch4,ch5,ch6,ch7,ch8,ch9,ch10,ch11,ch12,ch13,ch14,ch15) '
      annotations: {'channel_ids': array([ 1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16]),
        'channel_names': array(['ch0', 'ch1', 'ch2', 'ch3', 'ch4', 'ch5', 'ch6', 'ch7', 'ch8',
               'ch9', 'ch10', 'ch11', 'ch12', 'ch13', 'ch14', 'ch15'],
              dtype='<U64')}
      sampling rate: 10000.0 Hz
      time: 0.0 s to 10.0 s
1: Segment with 1 analogsignals, 1 epochs, 1 events, 3 spiketrains
   name: 'Seg #1 Block #0'
   annotations: {'seg_extra_info': 'This is the seg 1 of block 0'}
   # analogsignals (N=1)
   0: AnalogSignal with 16 channels of length 100000; units uV; datatype float32
      name: 'Channel bundle (ch0,ch1,ch2,ch3,ch4,ch5,ch6,ch7,ch8,ch9,ch10,ch11,ch12,ch13,ch14,ch15) '
      annotations: {'channel_ids': array([ 1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16]),
        'channel_names': array(['ch0', 'ch1', 'ch2', 'ch3', 'ch4', 'ch5', 'ch6', 'ch7', 'ch8',
               'ch9', 'ch10', 'ch11', 'ch12', 'ch13', 'ch14', 'ch15'],
              dtype='<U64')}
      sampling rate: 10000.0 Hz
      time: 15.0 s to 25.0 s






best


Samuel

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[Russell Jarvis]

Hi Andrew and Samuel, 

Explaining it as not knowing what the type was wrong. I guess what I meant was a quick contextual information, and location that is in python and not online. Yes, The tree hierarchy representation like the one in Julia would be good. Also I was wrong to suggest in dir(), maybe in the help() string. 

Russell.

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Russell Jarvis

Grad Research Assistant

Sols Graduate Programs

Arizona State University

Mail Code: 4601

Tempe, AZ a

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email: russell...@asu.edu

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