pygame image to base64

Question

I capture screen of my pygame program like this

           data = pygame.image.tostring(pygame.display.get_surface(),"RGB")

How can I convert it into base64 string? (WITHOUT having to save it to HDD). Its important that there is no saving to HDD. I know I can save it to a file and then just encode the file to base64 but I cant seem to encode "on the fly"

thanks

Answer 1

If you want, you can save it to a StringIO , which is basically a virtual file stored as a string.

However, I'd really recommend using the base64 module, which has a method called base64.b64encode . It handles your 'on the fly' requirement well.

Code example:

import base64
data = pygame.image.tostring(pygame.display.get_surface(),"RGB")
base64data = base64.b64encode(data)

Happy coding!

Answer 2

Actually - pygame.image.tostring() is a pretty strange function (really dont understand the binary string it returns, I cant find anythin that can process it right).

There seems to be an enhancement issue on this at pygame bitbucket: ( https://bitbucket.org/pygame/pygame/issue/48/add-optional-format-argument-to )

I got around it like this:

            data = cStringIO.StringIO()
            pygame.image.save(pygame.display.get_surface(), data)
            data = base64.b64encode(data.getvalue())

So in the end you get the valid and RIGHT base64 string. And it seems to work. Not sure about the format yet tho, will add more info tmrw