Is there a standard function in R to convert strings representing numbers of bytes such as
to integer numbers of bytes?
I came across humanReadable in the package gdata, but this does the conversion the other way round. I know that I can parse the string and then do the maths myself, but I wondered whether something exists already.
A simple function to do this:
x <- c("11855276K", "113M", "2.40G", "1234") convb <- function(x){ ptn <- "(\\d*(.\\d+)*)(.*)" num <- as.numeric(sub(ptn, "\\1", x)) unit <- sub(ptn, "\\3", x) unit[unit==""] <- "1" mult <- c("1"=1, "K"=1024, "M"=1024^2, "G"=1024^3) num * unname(mult[unit]) } convb(x) [1] 12139802624 118489088 2576980378 1234 You may want to add additional units and conversions, e.g. terabytes.
The excellent fs package has the function fs_bytes that can handle this in both directions.
## Create some number of bytes of differing units, and "convert" to fs_bytes sizes <- c("11855276K", "113M", "2.40G", "1234") |> fs::fs_bytes() ## It picks sensible human-readable default units for printing sizes ## 11.31G 113M 2.4G 1.21K ## The data is stored as numeric str(sizes) ## 'fs_bytes' num [1:4] 11.31G 113M 2.4G 1.21K ## As a result, you can perform numeric operations on them sum(sizes) ## 13.8G ## Use as.numeric to print the values as bytes as.numeric(sizes) ## [1] 12139802624 118489088 2576980378 1234 