Say I have an arbitrary Pint quantity q
. Is there a way to display its units in symbol short form, instead of as a full-length word?
In other words, how would I code unit_symbol()
such that it returns “m”, not “meter”; “kg” not “kilogram”; etc.? Is there a way to retrieve the short-form unit symbol that is synonym with the quantity’s current unit?
import pint ureg = pint.UnitRegistry() Q_ = ureg.Quantity def unit_symbol(q: pint.Quantity) -> str: # Intended to return "m", not "meter" # "kg" not "kilogram" # etc. # ??? return q.units # returns long-form unit, "meter", "kilogram" etc. :-( q = Q_(42, ureg.m) print(unit_symbol(q)) # "meter"... whereas I would like "m"
The above obviously fails to achieve this; it returns the long-form unit.
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Answer
You can use '~'
as a spec for the unit formatting:
q = Q_(42, "m") / Q_(1, "second") print(format(q, '~')) # 42.0 m / s print(format(q.u, '~')) # m / s
This feature is apparently undocumented, but can be inferred from the source code for Unit.__format__
(search for "~"
on that page to quickly navigate to the relevant piece of code).