How to write an Image to string in Julia? - string

Question

I want to encode an image in my directory "x.png" to a String or Array{UInt8, 1}.
I am writing a code in Julia to serialize an image using protobufs. It requires the image to be in encoded
String format.
In Python, it is done as follows. I am looking for similar functionality in Julia.
from PIL import Image
img = Image.load('x.png')
import io
output = io.BytesIO()
img.save(output, 'PNG')
img_string_data = output.getvalue()
output.close()
The output may be a String object or an Array{UInt8, 1}

Answer 1

In Julia you can achieve by writing:
img_string_data = read("x.png")
img_string_data now is Vector{UInt8}. You could also write read("x.png", String) to get a String (which is not that useful though as it will probably mostly contain invalid characters).
There is one difference between Julia solution and your Python solution. Julia approach will store in img_string_data the contents identical to what "x.png" holds on binary level while your Python solution will store an identical image, but possibly different on binary level (i.e. PIL might change some bytes in your file).