Another very tech’y post. Skip if you don’t like technical/implementation centric posts.

If you’re deploying mobile web-apps, you probably recognize the need for packaging small images into your CSS file using the “data-url” scheme. Recently I wanted to do just that. Being mostly from a Python background I went to my usual destination for quick software packages and searched. Good. Lots of packages. I hit the first one, and it turns out that the site mentioned doesn’t contain any packages to download (it rather looks like some kind of ad trap). Ok, next one.

No such luck. All the rest of them seemed to do other things. What’s a needy developer to do? Develop a quick script, of course!

So for quick commandline-based RFC2397 data url encodings, go and have a look at rfc2397 on PyPI. Sources to play with or fork are here.

Enjoy.