Saving and Loading UIImage from/to string

Question

Using the http://www.ifans.com/forums/showthread.php?t=132024 post from another question i am allowing the user to enter a signature. When the user is finished entering the signature i want to save it away to the database. I want to know if it is possible to save a UIImage to a string at all? And than also reload the UIImage from the string?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Yes, you could represent it as NSData and then convert it to NSString:

NSData *imageData = UIImagePNGRepresentation(yourPNGImage);
NSString *imageString = [[NSString alloc] initWithBytes: [imageData bytes] length:[imageData length] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

In case of jpeg images you can easily use UIImageJPEGRepresentation istead of UIImagePNGRepresentation.