[Utils] Text to file

[laggron42]

Type

• Bugfix
• Enhancement
• New feature

Description of the changes

This is a short util that will convert a long string into a discord.File object, useful to bypass the character limit. Nothing is wrote on the disk, io.BytesIO is used instead.

Example

from redbot.core.utils.chat_formatting import text_to_file

@commands.command()
async def getchannelmsg(self, amount: str, channel: discord.TextChannel = None):
    text = ""
    async for message in channel.history(limit=amount):
        text += f"{message.author}: {message.content}"
    if len(text) > 2000:
        await ctx.send(file=text_to_file(text))
    else:
        await ctx.send(text)

[jack1142]

Please use StringIO instead as you're using just text in this file, not bytes content.
Also, if other decide BytesIO is fine, bytes requires encoding passed to it, for example bytes(text, encoding="utf-8")

[zephyrkul]

iirc, discord.File requires the use of BytesIO for in-memory streams.

[jack1142]

discord.File support any file object, I also tested it specifically with StringIO before I posted.

[laggron42]

I tested with StringIO and it just returned an empty file.

^ following the python tutorial on how to use it, you can see the "0 bytes"

And I tested it without the encoding, it works fine.

[zephyrkul]

https://discordpy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/api.html#file

The type requires BufferedIOBase. StringIO does not inherit from this base class.

[Tobotimus]

Thanks, this is a pretty handy util :)

[DevilXD]

@retke I had the same problem when I wanted to send a file to the chat long time ago, and this is what was explained to me: https://i.imgur.com/nJnT4Wt.png
Your example should very much work after adding a seek(0) right before sending.

As for BytesIO/StringIO usage, one of the things I was trying to send in the chat as StringIO simply failed with some weird encoding error, that went away after switching to BytesIO with UTF-8 encoding set, so I'd recommend that. It was quite complicated mess of markdown-rich reddit post generator if this gives you any context to what could've happened. .encode() uses UTF-8 by default.

[laggron42]

Should be ready now.