Automatic units in monitor for large quantities

Would it be possible to support automatic unit conversion, similar to how tqdm implements this?

• unit : str, optional String that will be used to define the unit of each iteration [default: it].
• unit_scale : bool or int or float, optional If 1 or True, the number of iterations will be reduced/scaled automatically and a metric prefix following the International System of Units standard will be added (kilo, mega, etc.) [default: False]. If any other non-zero number, will scale total and n.

[rsalmei]

Hey @Jasonzyt, not yet, I couldn’t even commit it yet! It’s still all on my laptop here, but it is completely ready. I’ll try to finalize it asap 👍

[jhonatan-lopes]

Hi @rsalmei, I see what you mean, but consider the following scenarios:

1. I am counting something (say S units) that I don’t care much about the specific number, just a rough idea would be fine. Since it goes into thousands/millions, I am fine with an auto-scaling. Therefore, I use unit=S and wish that it auto-scales 1850000S to 1.85MS. In this case, alive-bar must default to auto-scaling and a 1000 unit scale parameter, i.e. a kilo-unit means 1000 of that unit.

2. I want to configure the bar to display bytes downloaded. This scenario is quite similar to the one above, except that unit_scale=1024. You could code the unit parameter to scale to 1024 when unit=B or unit=b, but I think that it loses generality.

3. I want to configure the bar to display an iteration counter that goes up to thousands. Maybe in this case I want to actually see at which iteration I am at a given moment with precision, so unit=it (for iterations) but unit_scale=1 meaning that I don’t want it to scale with SI prefixes. In this case I actually want to see 1850000 it.

With all that said, I do think that the two configurations are needed, both unit and unit_scale, especially since the user can wish to scale with esoteric bases/factors other than 10 and 2.

It could be that the default is that when unit is given and unit_scale is not, it assumes base 10 and auto-scaling with SI-prefixes.

What do you think?