Units-LE

Units-LE: One Quantity, One Unit

Find every quantity in a document — durations, sizes, percentages, frequencies — with its value in one base unit, and refuse the ambiguous ones by name

YAML · TOML · JSON · INI · dotenv · CSV · and anything else, scanned as text

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What it does

timeout: 30s in one service and timeout: 30000 in another are the same number of milliseconds, and nothing about the text says so. memory: 1GB and memory: 1GiB differ by 7% and look identical at a glance.

Run Units-LE: Extract Quantities and every quantity in the active document — a number welded to a unit — opens in a report beside the editor: as the document wrote it, in one base unit so two of them can be compared, with its line, column and key path. A quantity it cannot read unambiguously keeps its row and gets a reason instead of a guess. Works in VS Code and in VS Code–based editors like Cursor and VSCodium (installable from Open VSX).

• Before a migration — every timeout and memory limit in a values file, in milliseconds and bytes
• Reviewing a config change — the 500m that means minutes to one reader and millicores to another
• Against a runbook or a retention policy — the limit the document states, checked against the one the config sets
• Across a project — every file that holds a quantity, and how many, in one table

It never rewrites a document, and never guesses.

Install

A refusal is a finding

This is the whole product. Any tool can multiply 30s by a thousand; what makes this one usable in a review is that it will not pretend.

Every one of them keeps its row, its source text, its position and a sentence a person can act on. A refusal is never a dropped row and never a guess.

si_iec_hazard annotates; it does not withhold

It is the one reason that still answers. MB is 10^6 by the standard, so 1MB comes back as 1000000 bytes *and* carries reason: "si_iec_hazard" — because a great deal of software writes MB and means 2^20. Reporting nothing would be less useful than reporting the standard answer with the flag attached, and picking 2^20 would be the guess this tool exists not to make.

So it is not counted as refused. A row with si_iec_hazard is the only row that carries both a base and a reason; every other reason means the base is null.

A bare number with no unit is not a finding at all. timeout: 30 yields nothing here — that is numbers-le's question, and the boundary is what keeps the two tools distinct.

Four dimensions

Case is part of the symbol. MB is a megabyte and Mb is a megabit; folding them would silently multiply by eight, so Mb is refused rather than treated as a synonym.

`1h30m` is a grammar and `1h + 30m` is arithmetic. The first is one quantity written in two parts. Inside a compound the parts disambiguate each other — m alone is refused, and m between h and s can only be minutes, because a compound is written largest-first. That ordering is required rather than assumed, so 30s1h is not a quantity at all.

Physical units are a non-goal, not a gap. Length, mass, temperature belong to a different question, and reading them would mean unit algebra (m/s²), which is what uom is for. See crate/SPEC.md.

Formats

JSON, YAML, CSV, TOML, INI and dotenv are parsed. Everything else is scanned as text — a Kubernetes manifest, a Terraform file, a Markdown table of limits, a log — so the files where quantities actually live yield them rather than nothing.

Unlike numbers-le's text scan, this one has a shape to look for, so v1.2.3 yields nothing rather than two numbers. Every format with a shape carries a key path — cache.ttl, limits[0], server.timeout, TIMEOUT — and every finding carries a 1-based line and column, the column in UTF-16 units, which is the number your editor shows.

Its false-positive class is measured rather than imagined. A run inside an opaque blob still reads as a quantity: 001d in a UUID is one day, and a base64 hash ending /2w== is two weeks. The boundary characters that let those through are the same ones that let -30s and ttl=30s through. Over crate/fixtures/documents/opaque.txt — 280 lines of lockfile hashes, container digests, git object names, UUIDs and signing material, none of which is a quantity — the scan reports 5 false findings, 1.8%, and a test prints that number on every run. Each one carries its line and column, which is what makes it a row you discard rather than a number you trust.

It has no opinions

No "this timeout is too low". No defaults database. No conversion flag, no rewriting, no arithmetic. It reports what a document says and what that means in one base unit; which limits are right is the reviewer's call.

Across a folder or a workspace

Extract reads the document you have open. A scan reads many files from disk and gives one report.

• The whole workspace: run Units-LE: Scan Workspace for Quantities from the command palette.
• One folder: right-click it in the Explorer and choose Scan Folder for Quantities, or run Units-LE: Scan Folder for Quantities and pick one.

The report opens with a table of every file that holds something, then has a section per file:

# Units-LE workspace report

my-project · 113 file(s) read · 3 quantit(ies), 1 could not be resolved

deploy/values.yaml · yaml (3)

• 2:8 · 1h30m · duration · → 5400000 milliseconds · key cache.ttl
• 3:9 · 512MiB · bytes · → 536870912 bytes · key memory
• 4:7 · 2GB · bytes · → 2000000000 bytes · key disk

2 file(s) larger than the safety limit were not read.

What a scan reads. Files come from disk, so an unsaved edit is not seen. A file over the safety size, or one that is not UTF-8 text, is left unread. It stops at 5,000 files or 10,000 listed quantities. The report ends with a line for each thing it left out, so a short report is never mistaken for a clean project.

What it skips, and how to change that. Three switches are on by default, and each can be turned off on its own in Settings:

Two lists adjust the result without turning a switch off. To skip more, add a pattern to scanExcludes. To read something a switch would skip, add it to scanAlwaysInclude:

{

// Also skip the test fixtures. "units-le.workspace.scanExcludes": ["/fixtures/"], // Read the vendored code, though the built-in list skips it. "units-le.workspace.scanAlwaysInclude": ["/vendor/"] }

Units-LE: Open Settings opens all of these in the Settings editor.

The built-in list

Folders, wherever they appear:

.git, .hg, .svn, node_modules, bower_components, jspm_packages, .pnpm-store, .yarn, vendor, site-packages, Pods, Carthage, dist, build, out, target, _build, _site, dist-newstyle, zig-out, storybook-static, cdk.out, DerivedData, CMakeFiles, .next, .nuxt, .output, .svelte-kit, .angular, .astro, .docusaurus, .vuepress, .expo, .turbo, .parcel-cache, .cache, .sass-cache, .jekyll-cache, .dart_tool, .pub-cache, .gradle, .kotlin, .cxx, .externalNativeBuild, captures, `ephemer