Java - Image encoding in XML

Question

I thought I would find a solution to this problem relatively easily, but here I am calling upon the help from ye gods to pull me out of this conundrum. So, I've got an image and I want to store it in an XML document using Java. I have previously achieved this in VisualBasic by saving the image to a stream, converting the stream to an array, and then VB's xml class was able to encode the array as a base64 string. But, after a couple of hours of scouring the net for an equivalent solution in Java, I've come back empty handed. The only success I have had has been by: ``` import it.sauronsoftware.base64.*; import java.awt.image.BufferedImage; import org.w3c.dom.*; ... BufferedImage img; Element node; ... java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream os = new java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream(); ImageIO.write(img, "png", os); byte[] array = Base64.encode(os.toByteArray()); String ss = arrayToString(array, ","); node.setTextContent(ss); ... private static String arrayToString(byte[] a, String separator) { Stri…

Accepted Answer

I've done something similar (encoding and decoding in Base64) and it worked like a charm. Here's what I think you should do, using the class `Base64` from the Apache Commons project:

```
 //  ENCODING
 BufferedImage img = ImageIO.read(new File("image.png"));    
 ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
 ImageIO.write(img, "png", baos);    
 baos.flush();
 String encodedImage = Base64.encodeToString(baos.toByteArray());
 baos.close(); // should be inside a finally block
 node.setTextContent(encodedImage); // store it inside node

// DECODING
 String encodedImage = node.getTextContent();
 byte[] bytes = Base64.decode(encodedImage);
 BufferedImage image = ImageIO.read(new ByteArrayInputStream(bytes));
```

Hope it helps.

Java - Image encoding in XML

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