R help - Mar 2009 - How to dump plots as bas64 strings?

Hello

My question might sound awkward, but I am looking for a way to somehow
convert a plot in R into a base64 string.

Here's an idea, but it is not at all satisfying.

1. write the plot to the harddisk:
---------------------------
png("toto.png")
plot(c(1,2,3))
dev.off()
---------------------------

2. somehow reload that file from the disk and transform it into a base64
string:
---------------------------
bin<-readBin(file("toto.png","rb"), raw(), n=1000,endian
= "little")
...
---------------------------

Using the disk to perform this is not elegant, I don't know what value
to put for n, and I don't like the general idea.

Does anyone have a better suggestion? I have already searched on the
internet and in the mailing list, and I just found something on a
caTools package containing a base64encode & base64decode function.

Thanx for any ideas ...

Patrick

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 9:17 AM, Patrick Meyer <paterijk at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hello
>
> My question might sound awkward, but I am looking for a way to somehow
> convert a plot in R into a base64 string.
>
> Here's an idea, but it is not at all satisfying.
>
> 1. write the plot to the harddisk:
> ---------------------------
> png("toto.png")
> plot(c(1,2,3))
> dev.off()
> ---------------------------
>
> 2. somehow reload that file from the disk and transform it into a base64
> string:
> ---------------------------
> bin<-readBin(file("toto.png","rb"), raw(),
n=1000,endian = "little")
This isn't much of an improvement and does not even address the main
concern but as no one has answered note that we can pass the filename
as a character string and it will get "rb" automatically and we can
just use "raw" if we like.  Also n can be any size larger than the
file
size (see ?readBin) so if the file size is 10000 or less:

readBin("toto.png", "raw", n = 10000, endian =
"little")