Capturing only a portion of canvas with .todataurl Javascript/HTML5

Here's a method that uses an off-screen canvas:

var canvas = document.createElement('canvas');
canvas.width = desiredWidth;
canvas.height = desiredHeight;
canvas.getContext('2d').drawImage(originalCanvas,x,y,w,h,0,0,desiredWidth, desiredHeight);
result = canvas.toDataURL()

Create a new Canvas object of a specific size, use drawImage to copy a specific part of your canvas to a specific area of the new one, and use toDataURL() on the new canvas.

A bit more efficient (and maybe a cleaner) way of extracting part of the image:

// x,y are position in the original canvas you want to take part of the image
// desiredWidth,desiredHeight is the size of the image you want to have
// get raw image data
var imageContentRaw = originalCanvas.getContext('2d').getImageData(x,y,desiredWidth,desiredHeight);
// create new canvas
var canvas = document.createElement('canvas');
// with the correct size
canvas.width = desiredWidth;
canvas.height = desiredHeight;
// put there raw image data
// expected to be faster as tere are no scaling, etc
canvas.getContext('2d').putImageData(imageContentRaw, 0, 0);
// get image data (encoded as bas64)
result = canvas.toDataURL("image/jpeg", 1.0)