I've got a case where I want to convert binary blocks of data (various ctypes objects) to base64 strings.
The conversion calls in the base64 module expect strings as input, so right now I'm converting the binary blocks to strings first, then converting the resulting string to base64. This seems highly inefficient and I'd like to just go straight from binary to a base64 string. Here is the conversion we're using from object to string... import ctypes def ObjAsString(obj): sz = ctypes.sizeof(obj) charArray = ctypes.c_char * sz buf = charArray.from_address(ctypes.addressof(obj)) return buf.raw[:sz] The returned string can then be sent to base64 for conversion (although we're actually using xmlrpc.Binary), but there is obviously some waste in here. import base64 b64 = base64.b64encode(ObjAsString(foo)) Is there a canned/pre-existing way to convert a block of memory to a base64 string more efficiently? I'd like to avoid writing my own base64 conversion routine if possible. Anyone have any good ideas? Even a mroe efficient/less clunky way of conevrting an arbitrary object to a string would be appreciated. Thanks, Russ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
