# Using Measurement Objects

You can import any of the above measures from measurement.measures and use it for easily handling measurements like so:

    >>> from measurement.measures import Weight
    >>> w = Weight(lb=135) # Represents 135lbs
    >>> print w
    135.0 lb
    >>> print w.kg
    61.234919999999995

You can create a measurement unit using any compatible unit and can transform it into any compatible unit. See Measures for information about which units are supported by which measures.

To access the raw integer value of a measurement in the unit it was defined in, you can use the ‘value’ property:

    >>> print w.value
    135.0

# Guessing Measurements

If you happen to be in a situation where you are processing a list of value/unit pairs (like you might find at the beginning of a recipe), you can use the guess function to give you a measurement object.:

    >>> from measurement.utils import guess
    >>> m = guess(10, 'mg')
    >>> print repr(m)
    Weight(mg=10.0)

By default, this will check all built-in measures, and will return the first measure having an appropriate unit. You may want to constrain the list of measures checked (or your own measurement classes, too) to make sure that your measurement is not mis-guessed, and you can do that by specifying the `measures` keyword argument:

    >>> from measurement.measures import Distance, Temperature, Volume
    >>> m = guess(24, 'f', measures=[Distance, Volume, Temperature])
    >>> print repr(m)
    Temperature(f=24)

Warning

It is absolutely possible for this to misguess due to common measurement abbreviations overlapping – for example, both Temperature and Energy accept the argument `c` for representing degrees celsius and calories respectively. It is advisible that you constrain the list of measurements to check to ones that you would consider appropriate for your input data.

If no match is found, a `ValueError` exception will be raised:

    >>> m = guess(24, 'f', measures=[Distance, Volume])
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
      File "measurement/utils.py", line 61, in guess
        ', '.join([m.__name__ for m in measures])
    ValueError: No valid measure found for 24 f; checked Distance, Volume