Alchemist

Doing conversions for you so you don’t have to google them and making code more readable.

Having code that looks like this is meaningless

miles = 8 * 1609.344

You could add comments

miles = 8 * 1609.344 # converting meters to miles

But why not have this!

8.meters.to.miles

You can even perform mathematical operations

10.kilometers + 1.mile # 11.609344 kilometers

Handling bytes now works according to the JEDEC memory standard

1.kb.to.b.to_f == 1024.0

To switch to the IEC memory standard, force SI units with

Alchemist::use_si = true

You may also register your own units

Alchemist.register(:distance, [:beard_second, :beard_seconds], 5.angstroms)

Thanks to simonmenke you can now do comparisons without having to convert to floats like so:

5.grams == 0.005.kilograms

Installation

gem sources -a http://gemcutter.org
sudo gem install alchemist

Usage

require 'rubygems'
require 'alchemist'	

Or if you’re using rails

config.gem 'alchemist', :source => 'http://gemcutter.org'

Alchemist has conversions for:

Distance

• metres or meters
• fermis
• microns
• chains
• inches
• microinches
• mils
• rods
• leagues
• feet
• yards
• miles
• astronomical_units
• light_years
• parsecs
• nautical_miles
• admirality_miles
• fathoms
• cable_lengths
• angstroms
• picas
• printer_picas
• points
• printer_points

Mass

• grams or grammes
• carats
• ounces
• pennyweights
• pounds
• troy_pounds or apothecary_pounds
• slugs
• assay_tons
• metric_tons
• tons or short_tons

Volume

• litres or liters
• barrels
• bushels
• cubic_meters
• cups
• imperial_fluid_ounces
• fluid_ounces
• imperial_gallons
• gallons
• imperial_gills
• gills
• pints
• liquid_pints
• quarts
• liquid_quarts
• tablespoons
• teaspoons

And many more checkout lib/alchemist.rb for the rest