Copy image to clipboard in Python3

Question

First of all, the question on SO copy image to clipboard in python leads to answer Write image to Windows clipboard in python with PIL and win32clipboard?, which was only good for Python 2.x. -- I tried it and it didn't work. I overcame one problem: StringIO and cStringIO modules are gone in Python 3.0:, but bumped into another one:

TypeError: string argument expected, got 'bytes'

Hence, re-asking the same question again for Python 3 -- How to copy image to clipboard in Python 3? Here is the code I've got so far:

from io import StringIO
import win32clipboard
from PIL import Image

def send_to_clipboard(clip_type, data):
    win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
    win32clipboard.EmptyClipboard()
    win32clipboard.SetClipboardData(clip_type, data)
    win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()

filepath = 'image.jpg'
image = Image.open(filepath)

output = StringIO()
image.convert("RGB").save(output, "BMP")
data = output.getvalue()[14:]
output.close()

send_to_clipboard(win32clipboard.CF_DIB, data)

Thanks

Answer 1

You don't want StringIO here. Images are raw binary data, and in Py3, str is purely for text, bytes and bytes-like objects (bytearray, contiguous memoryviews, mmaps) are for binary data. To replace Py2's StringIO.StringIO for binary data, you want to use io.BytesIO in Python 3, not io.StringIO.