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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Submit Button Enabling

    "Enabling" you ask? Yes. We all know how to disable the submit upon form submission and the reasons for doing so, but what about re-enabling the submit button after an allotted amount of time. After all, what if the user presses the "stop"...

  • By
    Facebook Sliders With Mootools and CSS

    One of the great parts of being a developer that uses Facebook is that I can get some great ideas for progressive website enhancement. Facebook incorporates many advanced JavaScript and AJAX features: photo loads by left and right arrow, dropdown menus, modal windows, and...

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!