Convert image to text file

Hello everybody.

Im busy making a program but it needs to send an image over a connection. Anyways, it is only possible to sends pieces of strings at the moment. And therefore I want to convert the images I want to send into strings or whatever that can be written in a textbox.

Ive been trying stuff with streamreader / write but that didnt work so far.

Thanks in advance.

Any help would be appreciated.

If you can get the bytes that represent the image into a Byte array, you can use System.Convert.ToBase64String() to convert the bytes into a string. On the other end, you can use System.Convert.FromBase64String() to decode the string back to bytes. You could also write your own bytes->string encoding technique if you don't like base64 encoding.

I can't tell you how to get the bytes out of the image because you haven't specified whether it's a file on the hard drive or something in memory like the .NET Image class.

To continue with what Sitten said, one you get the image bytes back into a byte array, you create a memorystream from the byte array and use that to get your image (image.fromstream method)

Here's a small example assuming Image.FromFile. You should be able to change it up easily if you've already got a stream though.

Code:

---

Imports System.Drawing.Imaging

Public Class Form1

    Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) _
        Handles MyBase.Load

        Dim img As Image = Image.FromFile("C:\Temp\cupofcoffee.jpg")
        Dim str = ImageToBase64(img, ImageFormat.Jpeg)
        Dim imgFromString = Base64ToImage(str)
        PictureBox1.Image = imgFromString

    End Sub

    Public Function ImageToBase64(ByVal img As Image,
                                  ByVal fmt As System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat) As String
        Using ms As New IO.MemoryStream()
            img.Save(ms, fmt)
            Dim b = ms.ToArray()
            Return Convert.ToBase64String(b)
        End Using
    End Function

    Public Function Base64ToImage(ByVal s As String) As Image
        Dim b = Convert.FromBase64String(s)
        Using ms As New IO.MemoryStream(b, 0, b.Length)
            ms.Write(b, 0, b.Length)
            Return Image.FromStream(ms, True)
        End Using
    End Function
End Class

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I love you guys you guys are soo awesome, actually the image can be Anywhere, I chose wherever I want it to be, But thank you guys so much this was soo useful.

Im currently busy make a multi-user chat client which works 100% smooth but I wanted to add the option of sharing an image. And this isnt possible because my client only support strings to be send at the moment,