Way to convert image straight from URL to base64 without saving as a file in Python

Question

I'm looking to convert a web-based image to base64. I know how to do it currently by saving the image as a .jpg file and then using the base64 library to convert the .jpg file to a base64 string.

I'm wondering whether I could skip out the step of saving the image first? Thanks!

Answer 1

Using the requests library:

import base64
import requests


def get_as_base64(url):

    return base64.b64encode(requests.get(url).content)

Answer 2

Since requests is not an official package, I prefer to use urllib.

from urllib.request import urlopen 
import base64

base64.b64encode(urlopen("http://xxx/yyy/abc.jpg").read())