Data Explorer - scientific notation - does not adhere to options(scipen = xxx)

[benhmin]

System details:

Positron and OS details:

Positron Version: 2024.09.0 (Universal) build 27
Code - OSS Version: 1.92.0
Commit: d996153
Date: 2024-09-11T02:38:46.408Z
Electron: 30.1.2
Chromium: 124.0.6367.243
Node.js: 20.14.0
V8: 12.4.254.20-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 23.6.0

Interpreter details:

R 4.4.1

Describe the issue:

I am trying to use Positron for some data wrangling and the data explorer is great in general. However, I have multiple columns in various data frames that are of the type "double". These are typically 9-digit integers in my data, but this happens when they grow to over 7 digits.

The data explorer seems to always want these doubles in scientific notation. I have tried specifying the option(scipen=999) without any change.

If I change the data type of a column to integer then the scientific notation goes away.

I have found no setting in Positron nor anything on the google that gives me a hint that there is a setting somewhere else.

In RStudio if I set the scipen option and then run View(x) on a data frame it will respect the scipen option in the display.

Steps to reproduce the issue:

options(scipen = 999)
test_data <- data.frame(
                    order_proc_id = as.double(sample(11528843:11528943, 100, replace = TRUE)),
                    order_inst = sample(seq(as.POSIXct('2020-01-01'), as.POSIXct('2023-01-01'), by="day"), 100, replace = TRUE),
                    department_name_ahpl_combined = sample(c("Cardiology", "Neurology", "Oncology", "Pediatrics"), 100, replace = TRUE)
                ) |> View()

Expected or desired behavior:

Data Explorer should display numeric data in accordance with the scipen option setttings.

Were there any error messages in the UI, Output panel, or Developer Tools console?

[jmcphers]

I can reproduce this (thanks for the example!).

Positron

RStudio

[kv9898]

@lijiaqi-github, this seems to be the code responsible for this:

positron/src/vs/workbench/services/languageRuntime/common/languageRuntimeDataExplorerClient.ts

Lines 194 to 200 in c883cfc

	this._dataFormatOptions = {
	large_num_digits: 2,
	small_num_digits: 4,
	max_integral_digits: 7,
	max_value_length: 1000,
	thousands_sep: '',
	};

[kv9898]

It seems that it is rather more difficult to track the R scipen option than provide a language-agnostic setting entry in Positron for all data explorers. I think the latter would suffice, if I understood the issue correctly?

[lijiaqi-github]

It seems that it is rather more difficult to track the R scipen option than provide a language-agnostic setting entry in Positron for all data explorers. I think the latter would suffice, if I understand the issue correctly?

Sometimes I need to work with long strings of numbers in my dataset, like area codes + personal identification code (This number often is made very long) or the probability predicted by a model. The scientific notation in the data viewer makes them hard to read. It would be really helpful if they could be displayed as plain numbers instead.
Therefore, I vote for a global 'scipen' option. @juliasilge @kv9898

[kv9898]

#7266 proposes to add global scipen configuration to Positron data explorer.