# Defining Quantities¶

A quantity in Pint is the product of a unit and a magnitude.

Pint supports several different ways of defining physical quantities, including a powerful string parsing system. These methods are largely interchangeable, though you may need to use the constructor form under certain circumstances (see Temperature conversion for an example of where the constructor form is required).

## By multiplication¶

If you’ve read the Tutorial, you’re already familiar with defining a quantity by multiplying a Unit() and a scalar:

>>> from pint import UnitRegistry
>>> ureg = UnitRegistry()
>>> ureg.meter
<Unit('meter')>
>>> 30.0 * ureg.meter
<Quantity(30.0, 'meter')>


This works to build up complex units as well:

>>> 9.8 * ureg.meter / ureg.second**2
<Quantity(9.8, 'meter / second ** 2')>


## Using the constructor¶

In some cases it is useful to define Quantity() objects using it’s class constructor. Using the constructor allows you to specify the units and magnitude separately.

We typically abbreviate that constructor as Q_ to make it’s usage less verbose:

>>> Q_ = ureg.Quantity
>>> Q_(1.78, ureg.meter)
<Quantity(1.78, 'meter')>


As you can see below, the multiplication and constructor methods should produce the same results:

>>> Q_(30.0, ureg.meter) == 30.0 * ureg.meter
True
>>> Q_(9.8, ureg.meter / ureg.second**2)
<Quantity(9.8, 'meter / second ** 2')>


## Using string parsing¶

Pint includes a powerful parser for detecting magnitudes and units (with or without prefixes) in strings. Calling the UnitRegistry() directly invokes the parsing function:

>>> 30.0 * ureg('meter')
<Quantity(30.0, 'meter')>
>>> ureg('30.0 meters')
<Quantity(30.0, 'meter')>
>>> ureg('3000cm').to('meters')
<Quantity(30.0, 'meter')>


The parsing function is also available to the Quantity() constructor and the various .to() methods:

>>> Q_('30.0 meters')
<Quantity(30.0, 'meter')>
>>> Q_(30.0, 'meter')
<Quantity(30.0, 'meter')>
>>> Q_('3000.0cm').to('meter')
<Quantity(30.0, 'meter')>


Or as a standalone method on the UnitRegistry:

>>> 2.54 * ureg.parse_expression('centimeter')
<Quantity(2.54, 'centimeter')>


It is fairly good at detecting compound units:

>>> g = ureg('9.8 meters/second**2')
>>> g
<Quantity(9.8, 'meter / second ** 2')>
>>> g.to('furlongs/fortnight**2')
<Quantity(7.12770743e+10, 'furlong / fortnight ** 2')>


And behaves well when given dimensionless quantities, which are parsed into their appropriate objects:

>>> ureg('2.54')
2.54
>>> type(ureg('2.54'))
<class 'float'>
>>> Q_('2.54')
<Quantity(2.54, 'dimensionless')>
>>> type(Q_('2.54'))
<class 'pint.quantity.build_quantity_class.<locals>.Quantity'>


Note

Pint’s rule for parsing strings with a mixture of numbers and units is that units are treated with the same precedence as numbers.

For example, the units of

>>> Q_('3 l / 100 km')
<Quantity(0.03, 'kilometer * liter')>


may be unexpected at first but, are a consequence of applying this rule. Use brackets to get the expected result:

>>> Q_('3 l / (100 km)')
<Quantity(0.03, 'liter / kilometer')>


Note

Since version 0.7, Pint does not use eval under the hood. This change removes the serious security problems that the system is exposed to when parsing information from untrusted sources.