How to create in-memory file object

Question

I want to make a in-memory file to use in pygame mixer. I mean something like http://www.pygame.org/docs/ref/music.html#pygame.mixer.music.load which says load() method supports file object.

import requests from pygame import mixer  r = requests.get("http://example.com/some_small_file.mp3") in_memory_file = file(r.content) # something like this mixer.music.init() mixer.music.load(in_memory_file) mixer.music.play() 

Answer 1

You are probably looking for BytesIO or StringIO classes from Python io package, both available in python 2 and python 3. They provide a file-like interface you can use in your code the exact same way you interact with a real file.

StringIO is used to store textual data:

import io  f = io.StringIO("some initial text data") 

BytesIO must be used for binary data:

import io  f = io.BytesIO(b"\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x01\x01\x01\x01\x01\x01") 

To store MP3 file data, you will probably need the BytesIO class. To initialize it from a GET request to a server, proceed like this:

import requests from pygame import mixer import io  r = requests.get("http://example.com/somesmallmp3file.mp3") inmemoryfile = io.BytesIO(r.content)  mixer.music.init() mixer.music.load(inmemoryfile) mixer.music.play()  # This will free the memmory from any data inmemoryfile.close() 

Additional note: as both classes inherit from IOBase, they can be used as context manager with the with statement, so you don't need to manually call the close() method anymore:

import requests from pygame import mixer import io  r = requests.get("http://example.com/somesmallmp3file.mp3")  with io.BytesIO(r.content) as inmemoryfile:     mixer.music.init()     mixer.music.load(inmemoryfile)     mixer.music.play()