bitmath 1.0.4-1

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NOTE: I strongly urge you to read this on GitHub instead. Over there the Markdown formatting is rendered much more pleasantly.

• bitmath on GitHub.com

bitmath

bitmath simplifies many facets of interacting with file sizes in various units. Examples include: converting between SI and NIST prefix units (GiB to kB), converting between units of the same type (SI to SI, or NIST to NIST), basic arithmetic operations (subtracting 42KiB from 50GiB), and rich comparison operations (1024 Bytes == 1KiB).

In addition to the conversion and math operations, bitmath provides human readable representations of values which are suitable for use in interactive shells as well as larger scripts and applications.

In discussion we will refer to the NIST units primarily. I.e., instead of “megabyte” we will refer to “mibibyte”. The former is 10^3 = 1,000,000 bytes, whereas the second is 2^20 = 1,048,576 bytes. When you see file sizes in your file browser, or transfer rates in your web browser, what you’re really seeing are the base-2 sizes/rates.

Basics

### Class Initializer Signature

BitMathType([value=0, [bytes=None, [bits=None]]])

A bitmath type may be initialized in four different ways:

• Set no initial value

The default size is 0

zero_kib = KiB()

• Set the value in current prefix units

That is to say, if you want to encapsulate 1KiB, initialize the bitmath type with 1:

one_kib = KiB(1)

one_kib = KiB(value=1)

• Set the number of bytes

Use the bytes keyword

one_kib = KiB(bytes=1024)

• Set the number of bits

Use the bits keyword

one_kib = KiB(bits=8192)