[R] How to dump plots as bas64 strings?

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 1:27 PM, Duncan Temple Lang
<duncan at wald.ucdavis.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Patrick Meyer wrote:
>>
>> Here's the solution I'm using now, but it is not very "clean":
>>
>> png("out.png")
>> plot(c(1,2,3))
>> dev.off()
>>
>> system("base64 -w0 out.png > out.base64")
>> b64txt <- readLines(file("out.base64","rt"))
>>
>> It would be nice to have an internal solution, even if this exactly does
>> what I want.
>
> I'm not certain which bit of this you are referring to when you say
> "internal".  It would be covenient to have graphics devices be able to write
> to a buffer as well a  file and it wouldn't be terribly difficult
> to do, but hasn't been a big enough problem so far.

I have faced this too, i.e. having to write out plots only
read them back in again, and if there are two of us I suspect there
are more facing thistoo.  I was using a different encoding but
that was not a problem in any case, just the annoyance of having
to write out files only to read them back in.