number_to_human_size

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi all.

I have noticed some questionable behaviour when converting byte sizes into a human-readable form.

    $ruby script\console     Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.8)     >> include ActionView::Helpers::NumberHelper     => Object     >> number_to_human_size(1000)     => "1000 Bytes" # I wanted "1 kB"     >> number_to_human_size(1000000)     => "976.6 KB" # I wanted "1 MB"     >>

1. It's using the wrong prefix for the multiplier, or using the wrong multiplier for the prefix. (a) If using SI / metric prefixes, the multiplier should be 1000 (b) If using a multiplier of 1024, the prefixes should be the binary style (ki,Mi,Gi,...)

Mixing these up isn't great but a lot of people do get it wrong, and it's a hard habit to break. Ideally I suppose the method could have

  :metric Use 1000 and metric prefixes   :binary Use 1024 and binary prefixes   :broken Use 1000 and binary prefixes

And default to :binary, perhaps.

2. The "k" for "kilo" should be in lowercase.

TX