No, display
cannot prevent newlines, in part because there are no newlines to prevent. Each displayed object gets its own div
to sit in, and these are arranged vertically. You might be able to adjust this by futzing with CSS, but I wouldn't recommend that.
The only way you could really get two objects to display side-by-side is to build your own object which encapsulates multiple displayed objects, and display that instead.
For instance, your simple string case:
class ListOfStrings(object):
def __init__(self, *strings):
self.strings = strings
def _repr_html_(self):
return ''.join( [
"<span class='listofstr'>%s</span>" % s
for s in self.strings
])
display(ListOfStrings("hi", "hello", "hello there"))