Units and conversions

Units are case-sensitive and are never remapped, which is deliberate. m is metres and M is the millions suffix, and guessing between them would produce confidently wrong answers.

Most units have more than one spelling, and all of them work: lb, lbs and pounds are the same unit, as are m, metre and metres. What you will not get is a guess, so a spelling that is not a unit stays an error rather than being resolved to the nearest thing that looks similar.

Every spelling the engine accepts is listed on the unit reference page, which is generated by running each one through a real engine rather than by transcribing a table.

Arithmetic across units

The left operand decides the result unit.

100cm + 2m // 300.00 cm
1 km + 500 m // 1.50 km

Explicit conversion

to, in and into all convert.

5 km to miles // 3.11 miles
100 cm into m // 1.00 m
1 hour to minutes // 60 minutes
72F to C // 22.22 C
20C in F // 68.00 F

Surveying and older length units

1 furlong in m // 201.17 m
1 chain in m // 20.12 m
1 rod in m // 5.03 m
1 league in km // 4.83 km
1 hand in cm // 10.16 cm
1 mile in furlongs // 8.00 furlongs

A mil is a thousandth of an inch, which is small enough that a metric answer is easier to read the other way round.

1 m in mil // 39370.08 mil

Two mass units that often go missing. The carat is the metric one, exactly 200 mg, rather than the karat that grades gold. The centner is the metric hundred kilograms, not the Imperial hundredweight, which is separately cwt.

1 carat in g // 0.20 g
1 centner in kg // 100.00 kg

Converting to another representation

The as form is a general mechanism rather than a fixed list, and packages can add their own targets.

0.5 as % // 50.00%
0.75 as fraction // 3/4