Node.js get image from web and encode with base64

BufferList is obsolete, as its functionality is now in Node core. The only tricky part here is setting request not to use any encoding:

var request = require('request').defaults({ encoding: null });

request.get('http://tinypng.org/images/example-shrunk-8cadd4c7.png', function (error, response, body) {
    if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
        data = "data:" + response.headers["content-type"] + ";base64," + Buffer.from(body).toString('base64');
        console.log(data);
    }
});

LATEST, AS OF 2017 ENDING

Well, after reading above answers and a bit research, I got to know a new way which doesn't require any package installation, http module(which is built-in) is enough!

NOTE: I have used it in node version 6.x, so I guess its also applicable to above versions.

var http = require('http');

http.get('http://tinypng.org/images/example-shrunk-8cadd4c7.png', (resp) => {
    resp.setEncoding('base64');
    body = "data:" + resp.headers["content-type"] + ";base64,";
    resp.on('data', (data) => { body += data});
    resp.on('end', () => {
        console.log(body);
        //return res.json({result: body, status: 'success'});
    });
}).on('error', (e) => {
    console.log(`Got error: ${e.message}`);
});

I hope it helps!

Also, check more about the http.get(...) here !

If anyone encounter the same issue while using axios as the http client, the solution is to add the responseType property to the request options with the value of 'arraybuffer':

let image = await axios.get('http://aaa.bbb/image.png', {responseType: 'arraybuffer'});
let returnedB64 = Buffer.from(image.data).toString('base64');

Hope this helps