pygame.image

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pygame.image

This module contains functions to transfer images in and out of Surfaces. At the minimum the included load() function will support BMP files. If SDL_image is properly installed when pygame is installed, it will support all the formats included with SDL_image. You can call the get_extended() function to test if the SDL_image support is available.

Some functions that communicate with other libraries will require that those libraries are properly installed. For example, the save() function can only save OPENGL surfaces if pyopengl is available.

frombuffer	- create a surface from a python memory buffer
fromstring	- create a surface from a raw string buffer
get_extended	- returns true if SDL_image formats are available
load	- load an image to a new Surface
save	- save surface data
tostring	- create a raw string buffer of the surface data

frombuffer
pygame.image.frombuffer(string, size, format) -> Surface

This works like the

fromstring()

fromstring
pygame.image.fromstring(string, size, format, flipped=0) -> Surface

This will create a new Surface from a copy of raw data in a string. This can be used to transfer images from other libraries like PIL's fromstring().

In most cases you can use the

frombuffer()

get_extended
pygame.image.get_extended() -> int

This will return a true value if the extended image formats from SDL_image are available for loading.

load
pygame.image.load(file, [namehint]) -> Surface

This will load an image into a new surface. You can pass it either a filename, or a python file-like object to load the image from. If you pass a file-like object that isn't actually a file (like the StringIO class), then you might want to also pass either the filename or extension as the namehint string. The namehint can help the loader determine the filetype.

If pygame was installed without SDL_image support, the load will only work with BMP images. You can test if SDL_image is available with the

get_extended()

save
pygame.image.save(Surface, file) -> None

tostring
pygame.image.tostring(Surface, format, flipped=0) -> string

This will copy the image data into a large string buffer. This can be used to transfer images to other libraries like PIL's

fromstring()