Send a multidimensional numpy array over a socket

Question

Good day,

I\'ve searched for this but haven\'t come up with any responses. I wish to send a multi dimensional numpy array over a socket. Hence, I decided to convert it t

Answer 1

Indeed, .tostring only returns the raw data. This means you additionally need to send the shape and dtype of the array if these aren't known on the other side.

Maybe it's easier to serialize the array using Pickle:

import numpy as np
from cPickle import dumps, loads

x = np.array([[1, 2],[3, 4]], np.uint8)
print loads(dumps(x))
# [[1 2]
#  [3 4]]

Though for very small arrays the size overhead could be significant:

print len(x.tostring()), len(dumps(x))
# 4 171

For more on using Pickle, see here.