How to evaluate the size of a file upload in Ruby on Rails

Posted on 19 July 2006

Sometimes it's useful to show how large a file is on a wesite. If anything, showing the file size allows the user to guage roughly how long it's going to take to download/open it.

Fortunately the combination of ruby and rails make this easy:

number_to_human_size(File.size("#{doc.filename}"))

number_to_human_size is a rails number helper. It takes a number in bytes and formats it as a file size with KB, MB etc. to show how large it is.

File.size is a ruby method. It just evaluates the size of the file and returns it in bytes. Very handy for the number_to_human_size helper.

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