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!

Entoderm

If you share the code you have so far (downloading to a file and then converting), it will be easier for people to help you. As it is, I don't even know what library you want to use to fetch the file in the first place. – Laryssa

Answer 1

Using the requests library:

import base64
import requests


def get_as_base64(url):

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

Laryssa

if i dont save image so how could i get url of particular image? – Aldus

@Aldus : Couldn't the url be a s3 link maybe – Formula

base64 returns a bytes type so you may need to do another conversion to get a string type, for example base64.b64encode(requests.get(url).content).decode('utf-8') – Bridgid

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())

    

Lydia

Answer 3

Here is my solution::--

from base64 import b64encode
def url_to_base64(url):
    headers = {
        "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 \
            (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.103 Safari/537.36",
        "Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8",
    }
    return b64encode(requests.get(url, headers=headers, timeout=120).content).decode(
        "utf-8"
    )

Bindle