Convert a numpy.ndarray to string(or bytes) and convert it back to numpy.ndarray

Question

I'm having a little trouble here,

I'm trying to convert a numpy.ndarray to string, I've already done that like this:

randomArray.tostring()

It works, but I'm wondering if I can transform it back to a numpy.ndarray.

What's the best way to do this?

I'm using numpy 1.8.1

Context: The objective is to send the numpy.ndarray as a message in rabbitmq (pika library)

Answer 1

You can use the fromstring() method for this:

arr = np.array([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6])
ts = arr.tostring()
print(np.fromstring(ts, dtype=int))

>>> [1 2 3 4 5 6]

Sorry for the short answer, not enough points for commenting. Remember to state the data types or you'll end up in a world of pain.

Note on fromstring from numpy 1.14 onwards :

sep : str, optional

The string separating numbers in the data; extra whitespace between elements is also ignored.

Deprecated since version 1.14: Passing sep='', the default, is deprecated since it will trigger the deprecated binary mode of this function. This mode interprets string as binary bytes, rather than ASCII text with decimal numbers, an operation which is better spelt frombuffer(string, dtype, count). If string contains unicode text, the binary mode of fromstring will first encode it into bytes using either utf-8 (python 3) or the default encoding (python 2), neither of which produce sane results.

Answer 2

If you use tostring you lose information on both shape and data type:

>>> import numpy as np
>>> a = np.arange(12).reshape(3, 4)
>>> a
array([[ 0,  1,  2,  3],
       [ 4,  5,  6,  7],
       [ 8,  9, 10, 11]])
>>> s = a.tostring()
>>> aa = np.fromstring(a)
>>> aa
array([  0.00000000e+000,   4.94065646e-324,   9.88131292e-324,
         1.48219694e-323,   1.97626258e-323,   2.47032823e-323,
         2.96439388e-323,   3.45845952e-323,   3.95252517e-323,
         4.44659081e-323,   4.94065646e-323,   5.43472210e-323])
>>> aa = np.fromstring(a, dtype=int)
>>> aa
array([ 0,  1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9, 10, 11])
>>> aa = np.fromstring(a, dtype=int).reshape(3, 4)
>>> aa
array([[ 0,  1,  2,  3],
       [ 4,  5,  6,  7],
       [ 8,  9, 10, 11]])

This means you have to send the metadata along with the data to the recipient. To exchange auto-consistent objects, try cPickle:

>>> import cPickle
>>> s = cPickle.dumps(a)
>>> cPickle.loads(s)
array([[ 0,  1,  2,  3],
       [ 4,  5,  6,  7],
       [ 8,  9, 10, 11]])

Answer 3

Imagine you have a numpy array of integers (it works with other types but you need some slight modification). You can do this:

a = np.array([0, 3, 5])
a_str = ','.join(str(x) for x in a) # '0,3,5'
a2 = np.array([int(x) for x in a_str.split(',')]) # np.array([0, 3, 5])

If you have an array of float, be sure to replace int by float in the last line.

You can also use the __repr__() method, which will have the advantage to work for multi-dimensional arrays:

from numpy import array
numpy.set_printoptions(threshold=numpy.nan)
a = array([[0,3,5],[2,3,4]])
a_str = a.__repr__() # 'array([[0, 3, 5],\n       [2, 3, 4]])'
a2 = eval(a_str) # array([[0, 3, 5],
                 #        [2, 3, 4]])

Answer 4

I know, I am late but here is the correct way of doing it. using base64 . This technique will convert the array to string.

import base64
import numpy as np
random_array = np.random.randn(32,32)
string_repr = base64.binascii.b2a_base64(random_array).decode("ascii")
array = np.frombuffer(base64.binascii.a2b_base64(string_repr.encode("ascii"))) 
array = array.reshape(32,32)

For array to string

Convert binary data to a line of ASCII characters in base64 coding and decode to ASCII to get string repr.

For string to array

First, encode the string in ASCII format then Convert a block of base64 data back to binary and return the binary data.

Answer 5

This is a slightly improvised answer to ajsp answer using XML-RPC.

On the server-side when you convert the data, convert the numpy data to a string using the '.tostring()' method. This encodes the numpy ndarray as bytes string. On the client-side when you receive the data decode it using '.fromstring()' method. I wrote two simple functions for this. Hope this is helpful.

1. ndarray2str -- Converts numpy ndarray to bytes string.
2. str2ndarray -- Converts binary str back to numpy ndarray.

    def ndarray2str(a):
        # Convert the numpy array to string 
        a = a.tostring()

        return a

On the receiver side, the data is received as a 'xmlrpc.client.Binary' object. You need to access the data using ' .data '.

    def str2ndarray(a):
        # Specify your data type, mine is numpy float64 type, so I am specifying it as np.float64
        a = np.fromstring(a.data, dtype=np.float64)
        a = np.reshape(a, new_shape)

        return a

Note: Only problem with this approach is that XML-RPC is very slow while sending large numpy arrays. It took me around 4 secs to send and receive a (10, 500, 500, 3) size numpy array for me.

I am using python 3.7.4.

Answer 6

This is a fast way to encode the array, the array shape and the array dtype:

def numpy_to_bytes(arr: np.array) -> str:
    arr_dtype = bytearray(str(arr.dtype), 'utf-8')
    arr_shape = bytearray(','.join([str(a) for a in arr.shape]), 'utf-8')
    sep = bytearray('|', 'utf-8')
    arr_bytes = arr.ravel().tobytes()
    to_return = arr_dtype + sep + arr_shape + sep + arr_bytes
    return to_return

def bytes_to_numpy(serialized_arr: str) -> np.array:
    sep = '|'.encode('utf-8')
    i_0 = serialized_arr.find(sep)
    i_1 = serialized_arr.find(sep, i_0 + 1)
    arr_dtype = serialized_arr[:i_0].decode('utf-8')
    arr_shape = tuple([int(a) for a in serialized_arr[i_0 + 1:i_1].decode('utf-8').split(',')])
    arr_str = serialized_arr[i_1 + 1:]
    arr = np.frombuffer(arr_str, dtype = arr_dtype).reshape(arr_shape)
    return arr

To use the functions:

a = np.ones((23, 23), dtype = 'int')
a_b = numpy_to_bytes(a)
a1 = bytes_to_numpy(a_b)
np.array_equal(a, a1) and a.shape == a1.shape and a.dtype == a1.dtype

Answer 7

The right answer for for numpy version >1.9

arr = np.array([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6])
ts = arr.tobytes()
#Reverse to array
arr = np.frombuffer(ts, dtype=arr.dtype)
print(arr)

tostring() is deprecated

You don't need any external library (except numpy) and its there is no faster method to retrive the value!

Answer 8

Imagine you have a numpy array of text like in a messenger

 >>> stex[40]
 array(['Know the famous thing ...

and you want to get statistics from the corpus (text col=11) you first must get the values from dataframe (df5) and then join all records together in one single corpus:

 >>> stex = (df5.ix[0:,[11]]).values
 >>> a_str = ','.join(str(x) for x in stex)
 >>> a_str = a_str.split()
 >>> fd2 = nltk.FreqDist(a_str)
 >>> fd2.most_common(50)