Skip to content

intword: values between 10^36 and a googol format as huge decillion counts, and rounding to the next unit does not carry #356

Open

Description

@anp0429

What happened

intword handles values up to 1000 decillion (10^36) and exactly a googol
(10^100) well, but everything in between formats as an enormous decillion
count:

>>> import humanize
>>> humanize.intword(10**100)
'1.0 googol'
>>> humanize.intword(10**100 - 10**93)
'9999999000000000610151082626636586748864734715312950532670947852288.0 decillion'
>>> humanize.intword(10**50)
'100000000000000000.0 decillion'

A 67 digit unit count defeats the purpose of a human readable number, and
a value just below a googol that rounds up to it never carries to
"1.0 googol".

Verified on humanize 4.16.0 (published wheel) and on current main
(c3a124c), Python 3.11.

Why this looks like a bug rather than a choice

This is the same class of boundary behavior that #328 recently fixed for
metric() (carry to the next SI prefix when rounding reaches 1000). The
powers list jumps from decillion (10^33) to googol (10^100), and the
selection loop picks decillion for anything under a googol, no matter how
large the resulting count is. Values above the largest power already fall
back to str(value), which suggests the intended behavior for
"no reasonable unit" is the plain number, not a unit with a 67 digit
multiplier.

Expected

One of the following, whichever matches the project's intent:

  1. Values whose formatted count reaches 1000 of a unit with no adjacent
    next power fall back to str(value) (consistent with the existing
    above-maximum behavior), and values that round up to exactly the next
    power carry to it ("1.0 googol"), consistent with Carry metric() to the next SI prefix when rounding reaches 1000 #328's carry rule.
  2. Or simply fall back to str(value) for the whole gap between 10^36
    and 10^100.

I am happy to open a PR with regression tests for the boundary cases once
maintainers confirm which behavior is intended.

How this was found

An automated review gate proposed edge case tests for the recent number.py
changes (the #328 carry fix among them) and executed them against the
code; the "carry just below the next unit" test failed with the output
above. The failing test and its observed output are reproducible by hand
as shown.

Activity

  1. hugovk commented on Aug 4, 2026

    @hugovk
    Member

    @anp0429 Why did you close this?

  2. anp0429 commented on Aug 4, 2026

    @anp0429
    Author

    @hugovk Sorry, that was me being overzealous cleaning up my own open issues, I shouldn't have closed this one given #364 is open and addressing it. I've reopened it so it can track the fix. Happy to add the boundary-case regression tests I mentioned if that's useful to the PR.

  3. reopened this on Aug 4, 2026
  4. added a commit that references this issue on Sep 16, 2026
    934279e
  5. added a commit that references this issue on Sep 27, 2026
    ba2089e
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions