Generate Readable Byte Labels Using PHP

By  on  

Whenever you manage disk space, it's infinitely easier to read when when the bytes are displayed in KB, MB, GB... format. When reading files on the disk, the server returns the disk space in bytes so it's on us programmers to program file sizes for display. Using PHP, this task is cake.

function format_bytes($bytes)
{
    $labels = array('B','KB','MB','GB','TB');
    for($x = 0; $bytes >= 1024 && $x < (count($labels) - 1); $bytes /= 1024, $x++);
    return(round($bytes, 2).' '.$labels[$x]);
}

Users will appreciate this!

Recent Features

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

  • By
    Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations

    Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. JP

    I always like using the right-shift operator for this kind of stuff. So instead of:

    $bytes /= 1024

    I would use:

    $bytes >>= 10

    Of course, you lost the digits after the decimal point (unless you get fancy), but on the plus side, it’s way faster than floating point division. The shift operators must be some of the loneliest operators in PHP, don’t you think?

  2. Nice one!
    I did a similar function … somewhat overkill, but a usefull thing over the years =)
    http://openminds.lucido-media.de/human-readable-bytes-sorry-php-net

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!