The functions and classes in the humanfriendly package can be used to make text interfaces more user friendly. Some example features:
- Parsing and formatting numbers, file sizes, pathnames and timespans in simple, human friendly formats.
- Easy to use timers for long running operations, with human friendly formatting of the resulting timespans.
- Prompting the user to select a choice from a list of options by typing the option's number or a unique substring of the option.
- Terminal interaction including text styling (ANSI escape sequences), user friendly rendering of usage messages and querying the terminal for its size.
The humanfriendly package is currently tested on Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.4, 3.5 and PyPy.
It's very simple to start using the humanfriendly package:
>>> import humanfriendly
>>> user_input = raw_input("Enter a readable file size: ")
Enter a readable file size: 16G
>>> num_bytes = humanfriendly.parse_size(user_input)
>>> print num_bytes
17179869184
>>> print "You entered:", humanfriendly.format_size(num_bytes)
You entered: 16 GBUsage: humanfriendly [OPTIONS]
Human friendly input/output (text formatting) on the command line based on the Python package with the same name.
Supported options:
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
-c, --run-command |
Execute an external command (given as the positional arguments) and render a spinner and timer while the command is running. The exit status of the command is propagated. |
--format-table |
Read tabular data from standard input (each line is a row and each whitespace separated field is a column), format the data as a table and print the resulting table to standard output. See also the --delimiter option. |
-d, --delimiter=VALUE |
Change the delimiter used by --format-table to VALUE (a string). By default all whitespace is treated as a delimiter. |
-n, --format-number=VALUE |
Format a number (given as the integer or floating point number VALUE) with thousands separators and two decimal places (if needed) and print the formatted number to standard output. |
-s, --format-size=BYTES |
Convert a byte count (given as the integer BYTES) into a human readable string and print that string to standard output. |
-t, --format-timespan=SECONDS |
Convert a number of seconds (given as the floating point number SECONDS) into a human readable timespan and print that string to standard output. |
--parse-size=VALUE |
Parse a human readable data size (given as the string VALUE) and print the number of bytes to standard output. |
-h, --help |
Show this message and exit. |
The latest version of humanfriendly is available on PyPI and GitHub. The documentation is hosted on Read the Docs. For bug reports please create an issue on GitHub. If you have questions, suggestions, etc. feel free to send me an e-mail at peter@peterodding.com.
This software is licensed under the MIT license.
© 2016 Peter Odding.