How do I convert this (byte)string to an PILLOW Image?

Question

I got this byte-string from the BizHawk-Emulator via comm.socketServerScreenShot(). I understand that it's an PNG and hex encoded. So I tried to decode it (whole and splitted string), but there are some invalid hex numbers (?).
But how do I convert it into an useable image?

I also read this page about PNG and I understand some of it, however, not how I can do a "reverse hex dump" of the string.

A txt of the img: HexImage.txt

Here's a [GitHub issue](https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/issues/4097) on a similar topic. — Venkata N Bhupathi, Aug 09 '21 at 19:08
That's exactly what I have been looking for. Thank you very much! — 29thDay, Aug 09 '21 at 20:45

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 09 '21 at 20:48

The issue you are facing is most likely due to character encoding issues. If you store the received data in a variable, Python will interpret the \xNN values as characters and as such they need to be encoded before they can be saved to disk.

The choice of encoding will write different data. Normally you would like to store your data as "utf-8" (standard in Linux and most portable) or perhaps in some kind of windows format, e.g. "windows-1252". In this particular case, though, we are not dealing with text or symbols, but rather with raw data. Therefore neither of the codings above will give a correct, working output. What is needed, is rather raw_unicode_escape since this will encode the characters without modifying the underlying bit patterns.

Thus, to store the image, we need something like:

# Triple quote string, as it may contain both string markers ('")
img = """\x89PNG\r\n\x1a\n\x00\x00 ... \x00\x00\x00IEND\xaeB`\x82"""
with open("image.png", "wb") as f:
    f.write(img.encode("raw_unicode_escape")

I ran this on my computer and got an image displaying a little man in front of a house.

How do I convert this (byte)string to an PILLOW Image?

1 Answers1