Question

I am trying to pass a policy document to be encoded into base64.

The policy document is located at ~/policy_document

>>> policy = base64.b64encode(policy_document)

What do I need to do here to get policy_document to pass it to base64? Thank you.

Answer 1

# First open the file
# Then read the entire contents into memory
>>> policy_document = open("/absolute/path/to/policy_document", "r").read()

# Then base64 encode the contents.
>>> policy = base64.b64encode(policy_document)

# If you are using Python 2.7 you can use the with statement
# to ensure files are cleaned up
# (See @Niklas' comment)
>>> with open("/absolute/path/to/policy_document", "r") as fp:
...     policy_document = fp.read()
...      policy = base64.b64encode(policy_document)
# fp will be properly closed

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Alternately, if you need it to be from the current user’s home folder you could add a call to os.path.expanduser("~/policy_document")