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
    Create a CSS Cube

    CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals.  Add animation and you've got something really neat.  Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

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!