I like the fixed precision of senderle's decimal version, so here's a sort of hybrid of that with joctee's answer above (did you know you could take logs with non-integer bases?):
from math import log
def human_readable_bytes(x):
# hybrid of https://stackoverflow.com/a/10171475/2595465
# with https://stackoverflow.com/a/5414105/2595465
if x == 0: return '0'
magnitude = int(log(abs(x),10.24))
if magnitude > 16:
format_str = '%iP'
denominator_mag = 15
else:
float_fmt = '%2.1f' if magnitude % 3 == 1 else '%1.2f'
illion = (magnitude + 1) // 3
format_str = float_fmt + ['', 'K', 'M', 'G', 'T', 'P'][illion]
return (format_str % (x * 1.0 / (1024 ** illion))).lstrip('0')