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

This is a slightly improvised answer for ajsp answer using XML-RPC.

On the server-side when you convert the data, convert the numpy data to a string using the '.tostring()' method. This encodes the numpy ndarray as bytes string. On the client-side when you receive the data decode it using '.fromstring()' method. I wrote two simple functions for this. Hope this is helpful.

1. ndarray2str -- Converts numpy ndarray to bytes string.
2. str2ndarray -- Converts binary str back to numpy ndarray.

    def ndarray2str(a):
        # Convert the numpy array to string 
        a = a.tostring()

        return a

On the receiver side, the data is received as a 'xmlrpc.client.Binary' object. You need to access the data using '.data'.

    def str2ndarray(a):
        # Specify your data type, mine is numpy float64 type, so I am specifying it as np.float64
        a = np.fromstring(a.data, dtype=np.float64)
        a = np.reshape(a, new_shape)

        return a

Note: Only problem with this approach is that XML-RPC is very slow while sending large numpy arrays. It took me around 4 secs to send and receive a (10, 500, 500, 3) size numpy array for me.

I am using python 3.7.4.