Anyone know how I would convert bytes which are sent via a websocket (from a C# app) to an image? I then want to draw the image on a canvas. I can see two ways of doing this:
- Somehow draw the image on the canvas in byte form without converting
it.
- Convert the bytes to a base64 string somehow in javascript then
draw.
Here's my function which receives the bytes for drawing:
function draw(imgData) {
var img=new Image();
img.onload = function() {
cxt.drawImage(img, 0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
};
// What I was using before...
img.src = "data:image/jpeg;base64,"+imgData;
}
I was receiving the image already converted as a base64 string before, but after learning that sending the bytes is smaller in size (30% smaller?) I would prefer to get this working. I should also mention that the image is a jpeg.
Anyone know how I would do it? Thanks for the help. :)
If your image is really a jpeg already, you can just convert the received data to a base64 stream. Firefox and Webkit browsers (as I recall) have a certain function, btoa()
. It converts the input string to a base64 encoded string. Its counterpart is atob()
that does the opposite.
You could use it like the following:
function draw(imgData){
var b64imgData = btoa(imgData); //Binary to ASCII, where it probably stands for
var img = new Image();
img.src = "data:image/jpeg;base64," + b64imgData;
document.body.appendChild(img); //or append it to something else, just an example
}
If the browser you target (IE, for example) isn't Firefox or a Webkit one, you can use one of the multiple conversion function lying around the internet (good one, it also provides statistics of performances in multiple browsers, if you're interested :)
I used this in the end:
function draw(imgData, frameCount) {
var r = new FileReader();
r.readAsBinaryString(imgData);
r.onload = function(){
var img=new Image();
img.onload = function() {
cxt.drawImage(img, 0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
}
img.src = "data:image/jpeg;base64,"+window.btoa(r.result);
};
}
I needed to read the bytes into a string before using btoa().