I finally got around to playing a tiny bit with pandas today and was delighted when I saw its representation in the IPython notebook. Take a look in the PDF.
IPython detects a special _repr_html_ method on (in this case) the pandas DataFrame object and uses that for the output instead of the usual __str__ or __repr__ methods. Here _repr_html_ returns the contents of the DataFrame in an HTML table, which is also useful for posting to a blog:
| Ant | Bat | Cat | Dog | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| 1 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 2 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 3 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 4 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
This is another great feature of the IPython notebook and I look forward to it popping up in more places!
Pen and Pants 
[…] IPython Notebook makes it possible to display rich representations of Python objects using HTML (among other things). That allowed me to make a Python object whose representation in […]