Node.js get image from web and encode with base64

I'm trying to fetch an image from the web and encode it with base64.

what i have so far is basically:

var request = require('request');
var BufferList = require('bufferlist').BufferList;

bl = new BufferList(),

request({uri:'http://tinypng.org/images/example-shrunk-8cadd4c7.png',responseBodyStream: bl}, function (error, response, body) 
{
    if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) 
    {
        var type = response.headers["content-type"];
        var prefix = "data:" + type + ";base64,";
        var base64 = new Buffer(bl.toString(), 'binary').toString('base64');
        var data = prefix + base64;
        console.log(data);
    }
});

This seems to be pretty close to the solution but i can't quite get it to work. It recognizes the data type and gives out the output:

data:image/png;base64

however the bufferlist 'bl' seems to be empty.

Thanks in advance!

BufferList is obsolete, as its functionality is now in Node core. The only tricky part here is setting request not to use any encoding:

var request = require('request').defaults({ encoding: null });

request.get('http://tinypng.org/images/example-shrunk-8cadd4c7.png', function (error, response, body) {
    if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
        data = "data:" + response.headers["content-type"] + ";base64," + Buffer.from(body).toString('base64');
        console.log(data);
    }
});

LATEST, AS OF 2017 ENDING

Well, after reading above answers and a bit research, I got to know a new way which doesn't require any package installation, http module(which is built-in) is enough!

NOTE: I have used it in node version 6.x, so I guess its also applicable to above versions.

var http = require('http');

http.get('http://tinypng.org/images/example-shrunk-8cadd4c7.png', (resp) => {
    resp.setEncoding('base64');
    body = "data:" + resp.headers["content-type"] + ";base64,";
    resp.on('data', (data) => { body += data});
    resp.on('end', () => {
        console.log(body);
        //return res.json({result: body, status: 'success'});
    });
}).on('error', (e) => {
    console.log(`Got error: ${e.message}`);
});

I hope it helps!

Also, check more about the http.get(...) here !

If anyone encounter the same issue while using axios as the http client, the solution is to add the responseType property to the request options with the value of 'arraybuffer':

let image = await axios.get('http://aaa.bbb/image.png', {responseType: 'arraybuffer'});
let returnedB64 = Buffer.from(image.data).toString('base64');

Hope this helps

Node.js get image from web and encode with base64

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