xplr

Overview

The xplr package is aimed at quick visualization of Python objects in exploratory data analysis. It has two functions:

• plot—Create basic sensible plot of object
• view—Export object to temporary file and open in default external program

The plot function has the following modes:

The view function has the following modes:

• GeoSeries, GeoDataFrame—Exported to '.gpkg' and opened (e.g., in QGIS)
• Series, DataFrame—Exported to '.xlsx' and opened (e.g., in LibreOffice)

The functionality of plot and view is inspired by the base R functions plot and View, respectively.

Examples

Let’s import the two functions:

from xplr import plot
from xplr import view

Suppose we have a GeoDataFrame named pols in our Python environment:

import shapely
import geopandas as gpd
pols = gpd.GeoSeries([
    shapely.geometry.Polygon([(0,0), (2,0), (2,2), (0,2)]),
    shapely.geometry.Polygon([(2,2), (4,2), (4,4), (2,4)]),
    shapely.geometry.Polygon([(1,1), (3,1), (3,3), (1,3)]),
    shapely.geometry.Polygon([(3,3), (5,3), (5,5), (3,5)]),
])
pols = gpd.GeoDataFrame({'geometry': pols, 'value': [1,2,2,3]})
pols

Here is how we can plot it:

plot(pols)

Additional arguments to the plotting method can be passed as follows:

plot(pols, 'value', color='none')

/home/michael/venv/m/lib/python3.14/site-packages/xplr/xplr.py:45: UserWarning: Only specify one of 'column' or 'color'. Using 'color'.
  x.plot(legend=True, *args, **kwargs)

view can be used to open the layer in an external program:

view(pols)

/home/michael/venv/m/lib/python3.14/site-packages/pyogrio/geopandas.py:948: UserWarning: 'crs' was not provided.  The output dataset will not have projection information defined and may not be usable in other systems.
  write(

'/tmp/tmp4y8vh0nz.gpkg'

The layer is exported to a temporary file, which is then opened in the default program (e.g., QGIS).

Import on startup

To load the two functions plot and view on startup of python or ipython in the terminal, so that you can quickly use them anytime, use the following instructions for Linux. (On other operating systems, or other Python interfaces, look up analogous instructions of installing a startup script specific to your system.)

Create a startup script, such as ~/.python_startup.py:

from xplr import plot
from xplr import view

For the script to be automatically executed on python startup, add this in your .bashrc:

export PYTHONSTARTUP=~/.python_startup.py

In addition, for the script to be automatically executed on ipython startup, create ipython profiles (if you don’t already have them):

ipython profile create

Then, uncomment the following expression in ~/.ipython/profile_default/ipython_config.py:

c.InteractiveShellApp.exec_PYTHONSTARTUP = True