The prettyunits package formats quantities in human readable form.
- Time intervals: ‘1337000’ -> ‘15d 11h 23m 20s’.
- Vague time intervals: ‘2674000’ -> ‘about a month ago’.
- Bytes: ‘1337’ -> ‘1.34 kB’.
- Rounding: ‘99’ with 3 significant digits -> ‘99.0’
- p-values: ‘0.00001’ -> ‘<0.0001’.
- Colors: ‘#FF0000’ -> ‘red’.
- Quantities: ‘1239437’ -> ‘1.24 M’.
You can install the package from CRAN:
install.packages("prettyunits")If you need the development version, install it from GitHub:
pak::pak("r-lib/prettyunits")pretty_bytes formats number of bytes in a human readable way:
pretty_bytes(1337)##> [1] "1.34 kB"
pretty_bytes(133337)##> [1] "133.34 kB"
pretty_bytes(13333337)##> [1] "13.33 MB"
pretty_bytes(1333333337)##> [1] "1.33 GB"
pretty_bytes(133333333337)##> [1] "133.33 GB"
Here is a simple function that emulates the Unix ls command, with
nicely formatted file sizes:
uls <- function(path = ".") {
files <- dir(path)
info <- files |>
lapply(file.info) |>
do.call(what = rbind)
info$size <- pretty_bytes(info$size)
df <- data.frame(d = ifelse(info$isdir, "d", " "),
mode = as.character(info$mode), user = info$uname, group = info$grname,
size = ifelse(info$isdir, "", info$size), modified = info$mtime, name = files)
print(df, row.names = FALSE)
}
uls()##> d mode user group size modified name
##> 644 gaborcsardi staff 264 B 2025-04-26 17:24:48 _pkgdown.yml
##> 644 gaborcsardi staff 0 B 2025-04-28 09:00:42 air.toml
##> 644 gaborcsardi staff 232 B 2023-09-24 11:37:28 codecov.yml
##> d 755 gaborcsardi staff 2025-04-28 09:03:47 data-raw
##> 644 gaborcsardi staff 1.30 kB 2025-04-28 09:04:57 DESCRIPTION
##> 644 gaborcsardi staff 49 B 2025-04-26 17:24:48 LICENSE
##> 644 gaborcsardi staff 1.08 kB 2025-04-26 17:24:48 LICENSE.md
##> 644 gaborcsardi staff 111 B 2023-09-23 16:44:21 Makefile
##> d 755 gaborcsardi staff 2025-04-28 09:00:33 man
##> 644 gaborcsardi staff 391 B 2025-04-26 17:24:39 NAMESPACE
##> 644 gaborcsardi staff 1.55 kB 2025-04-28 09:00:33 NEWS.md
##> d 755 gaborcsardi staff 2025-04-28 09:00:33 R
##> 644 gaborcsardi staff 40.66 kB 2025-04-28 09:06:22 README.html
##> 644 gaborcsardi staff 8.16 kB 2025-04-28 09:06:19 README.md
##> 644 gaborcsardi staff 4.48 kB 2025-04-28 09:06:08 README.Rmd
##> d 755 gaborcsardi staff 2025-04-26 17:24:48 tests
pretty_num formats number related to linear quantities in a human
readable way:
pretty_num(1337)##> [1] "1.34 k"
pretty_num(-133337)##> [1] "-133.34 k"
pretty_num(1333.37e-9)##> [1] "1.33 u"
Be aware that the result is wrong in case of surface or volumes, and for any non-linear quantity.
Here is a simple example of how to prettify a entire tibble
library(tidyverse)##> ── Attaching core tidyverse packages ───────────────────── tidyverse 2.0.0 ──
##> ✔ dplyr 1.1.4 ✔ readr 2.1.5
##> ✔ forcats 1.0.0 ✔ stringr 1.5.1
##> ✔ ggplot2 3.5.2 ✔ tibble 3.2.1
##> ✔ lubridate 1.9.4 ✔ tidyr 1.3.1
##> ✔ purrr 1.0.4
##> ── Conflicts ─────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
##> ✖ tidyr::extract() masks magrittr::extract()
##> ✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
##> ✖ dplyr::lag() masks stats::lag()
##> ✖ purrr::set_names() masks magrittr::set_names()
##> ℹ Use the conflicted package (<http://conflicted.r-lib.org/>) to force all conflicts to become errors
tdf <- tribble( ~name, ~`size in m`, ~`speed in m/s`,
"land snail", 0.075, 0.001,
"photon", NA, 299792458,
"African plate", 10546330, 0.000000000681)
tdf |> mutate(across(where(is.numeric), pretty_num))##> # A tibble: 3 × 3
##> name `size in m` `speed in m/s`
##> <chr> <chr> <chr>
##> 1 land snail " 75 m" " 1 m"
##> 2 photon " NA " "299.79 M"
##> 3 African plate "10.55 M" " 681 p"
pretty_ms formats a time interval given in milliseconds. pretty_sec
does the same for seconds, and pretty_dt for difftime objects. The
optional compact argument turns on a compact, approximate format.
pretty_ms(c(1337, 13370, 133700, 1337000, 1337000000))##> [1] "1.3s" "13.4s" "2m 13.7s" "22m 17s"
##> [5] "15d 11h 23m 20s"
pretty_ms(c(1337, 13370, 133700, 1337000, 1337000000),
compact = TRUE)##> [1] "~1.3s" "~13.4s" "~2m" "~22m" "~15d"
pretty_sec(c(1337, 13370, 133700, 1337000, 13370000))##> [1] "22m 17s" "3h 42m 50s" "1d 13h 8m 20s" "15d 11h 23m 20s"
##> [5] "154d 17h 53m 20s"
pretty_sec(c(1337, 13370, 133700, 1337000, 13370000),
compact = TRUE)##> [1] "~22m" "~3h" "~1d" "~15d" "~154d"
vague_dt and time_ago formats time intervals using a vague format,
omitting smaller units. They both have three formats: default, short
and terse. vague_dt takes a difftime object, and time_ago works
relatively to the specified date.
vague_dt(format = "short", as.difftime(30, units = "secs"))##> [1] "<1 min"
vague_dt(format = "short", as.difftime(14, units = "mins"))##> [1] "14 min"
vague_dt(format = "short", as.difftime(5, units = "hours"))##> [1] "5 hours"
vague_dt(format = "short", as.difftime(25, units = "hours"))##> [1] "1 day"
vague_dt(format = "short", as.difftime(5, units = "days"))##> [1] "5 day"
now <- Sys.time()
time_ago(now)##> [1] "moments ago"
time_ago(now - as.difftime(30, units = "secs"))##> [1] "less than a minute ago"
time_ago(now - as.difftime(14, units = "mins"))##> [1] "14 minutes ago"
time_ago(now - as.difftime(5, units = "hours"))##> [1] "5 hours ago"
time_ago(now - as.difftime(25, units = "hours"))##> [1] "a day ago"
pretty_round() and pretty_signif() preserve trailing zeros.
pretty_round(1, digits=6)##> [1] "1.000000"
pretty_signif(c(99, 0.9999), digits=3)##> [1] "99.0" "1.00"
pretty_p_value() rounds small p-values to indicate less than
significance level for small values.
pretty_p_value(c(0.05, 0.0000001, NA))##> [1] "0.0500" "<0.0001" NA
pretty_color converts colors from other representations to
human-readable names.
pretty_color("black")##> [1] "black"
##> attr(,"alt")
##> [1] "black" "gray0" "grey0" "Black"
pretty_color("#123456")##> [1] "Prussian Blue"
##> attr(,"alt")
##> [1] "Prussian Blue"
