Question

In Python the string:

a = '00001111\n00110011\n00110101\n.....'

How would I convert that to an image of let’s say 8×8 pixels where 0 stands for black and 1 stands for white. Is the route to study for example BMP and make a BMP file from it. Or are there smoother roads to enlightenment?

Answer 1

The first step is to convert your string to a sequence of bytes containing the proper values:

pixel_value = {'0': 0, '1': 255}
byte_seq = ''.join(chr(pixel_value[c]) for c in a if c in pixel_value)

Then use PIL’s Image.fromstring to convert it to an image:

from PIL import Image
im = Image.fromstring('L', (8, 8), byte_seq)
im.show()