Input Upper Case characters = error

[joelabair]

bash >node

bytes = require('bytes')
[Function]
bytes('5MB')
TypeError: Cannot read property '1' of null
at module.exports (./node_modules/bytes/index.js:13:27)
at repl:1:2
at REPLServer.self.eval (repl.js:110:21)
at Interface. (repl.js:239:12)
at Interface.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:95:17)
at Interface._onLine (readline.js:202:10)
at Interface._line (readline.js:531:8)
at Interface._ttyWrite (readline.js:760:14)
at ReadStream.onkeypress (readline.js:99:10)
at ReadStream.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:98:17)
bytes('5mb')
5242880

[benmosher]

+1

[theofidry]

+1

[theofidry]

Fixed in my fork https://github.com/theofidry/bytes.js, waiting for merge.

[rhys-vdw]

I'm confused by this, isn't Mb megabits, whereas MB is megabytes? It seems the API of this module is kind of broken in general. Shouldn't mb be an error, as lower-case m has no meaning in this context?

[tj]

@rhys-vdw technically MiB no? This module was never really intended to get that specific, but I'd +1 a new major-level release that fixes things up. Personally I'd still prefer --limit 5mb over --limit 5MiB etc but hey, maybe we can just leave that as the default behaviour that we see now

[theofidry]

According to Wikipedia, it's MB.

As for using mb as an input, I would be more the kind to be fault tolerant and interpret it as MB instead of throwing an error.

But that raises the point of what will happen if you pass a value not understood (like 1my), and written in the Readme, it returns null.

[rhys-vdw]

I think @tj is correct in that the units that this library deals with are multiples of 1024, so technically 'mb' is interpreted as 'mibibytes'. However, in practise I never hear anyone using that term. I think I'd refer to mibibytes as 'megabytes'.

If it's interesting, the reason I suggested this was that I wanted to store the string in a config file, and also forward the error to the user. So:

maxFileSize = config.get('maxFileSize');
if (file.size > bytes(maxFileSize)) {
  throw new Error('File exceeds maximum size of ' + maxFileSize);
}

But I don't want my error message (or config) to have the incorrect units. Obviously there are numerous workarounds for this (simplest being to change cases contextually).

I see now that this is really a pretty simple module with limited use cases. Unless you want to expand to handling conversion between different units (bytes, bits, mibibytes, megabytes) @theofidry's solution is probably most appropriate.

[tj]

I wouldn't mind support for bits/bytes since network config is typical in bits, but I'd definitely worry about people misconfiguring with different units