Insert images to XML file

Question

I would like to insert an images within an element the XML file  what is the best way to do this  Would you please suggest some good way to include an images to xml file

User · Answer

I always convert the byte data to a Base64 encoding and then insert the image   This is also the way that Word does it  for it s XML files  not that Word is a good example on how to work with XML  P

User · Answer

XML is not a format for storing images  neither binary data  I think it all depends on how you want to use those images  If you are in a web application and would want to read them from there and display them  I would store the URLs  If you need to send them to another web endpoint  I would serialize them  rather than persisting manually in XML  Please explain what is the scenario

User · Answer

Here s some code taken from Kirk Evans Blog that demonstrates how to encode an image in C      Load the picture from a file Image picture   Image FromFile   c  temp test gif       Create an in-memory stream to hold the picture s bytes System IO MemoryStream pictureAsStream   new System IO MemoryStream    picture Save pictureAsStream  System Drawing Imaging ImageFormat Gif      Rewind the stream back to the beginning pictureAsStream Position   0    Get the stream as an array of bytes byte   pictureAsBytes   pictureAsStream ToArray       Create an XmlTextWriter to write the XML somewhere    here  I just chose   to stream out to the Console output stream System Xml XmlTextWriter writer   new System Xml XmlTextWriter Console Out      Write the root element of the XML document and the base64 encoded data writer WriteStartElement  w    binData                             http   schemas microsoft com office word 2003 wordml     writer WriteBase64 pictureAsBytes  0  pictureAsBytes Length    writer WriteEndElement    writer Flush

User · Answer

The most common way of doing this is to include the binary as base-64 in an element  However  this is a workaround  and adds a bit of volume to the file   For example  this is the bytes 00 to 09  note we needed 16 bytes to encode 10 bytes worth of data     lt xml gt  lt image gt AAECAwQFBgcICQ   lt  image gt  lt  xml gt    how you do this encoding varies per architecture  For example  with  NET you might use Convert ToBase64String  or XmlWriter WriteBase64

User · Answer

Since XML is a text format and images are usually not  except some ancient and archaic formats  there is no really sensible way to do it  Looking at things like ODT or OOXML also shows you that they don t embed images directly into XML   What you can do  however  is convert it to Base64 or similar and embed it into the XML   XML s whitespace handling may further complicate things in such cases  though

[xml] Insert images to XML file

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