How to send Images via SocketServer in Python 3?

Question

I would like to send images with socketserver of python 3 and I have a problem of encoding. Do I need to send it in bytes or in text? And do I need to open my image with the 'b' option and to transform it in a particular format?

With previous version of python I could do :

image = open('my_image.jpg', 'rb')
image_data = image.read()
image.close()

socketData = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
socketData.connect((ADDRESS,PORT))

socketData.sendall(image_data)

But with python 3, it doesn't work anymore. There are encoding and codecs problems and I don't really understand the using of encode(), decode() or str().

Do you have any idea how I can implement it?

Thanks

Answer 1

Like I wrote above, your code works as-is currently. To add a header to the data that you want to send over the socket, you first need to know its encoding. Assuming that it is UTF-8, you can do the following:

header = "Header！\n"
header_bytes = bytes(header, 'utf-8')
socketData.sendall(header_bytes + image_data)

bytes type can only be concatenated with bytes in Python 3.