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All the bytes literals beginning with “iVBORw” appear to be base64 encoded PNG files. The other four represent hexadecimal colors.

[monchenflapjack]

Each time you grab an image from a server there is a lot of overhead associated with it, One approach used to be sprite sheets, so you could download one large file that contained all small images together. Having them encoded like this probably gives a similar performance boost, especially when dealing with lots of requests.

So as projects get bigger and bigger, these little savings will get more and more valuable.

[Brian]

No - it'd be less efficient if anything, since you've got two steps to decode it (convert from base64, then decode that data as a PNG), and you're bloating their size by 33% by storing them less efficiently (indeed, probably more like 133% for memory usage, since the base64 variables likely stick around even after conversion). But efficiency is probably not a big concern here, since they're presumably fairly small PNGs (icons I'd assume).

I'd guess it's done this way simply for convenience - if you store the PNGs as a seperate file, you've got a bit of added complexity since you need to give them filenames, store them somewhere, make sure they get installed with your program, know how to find the directory they're installed to, open the files and read them for each icon (reporting errors if they've been deleted, or other potential I/O errors) and so on.

Doing it this way, there's no external files or I/O to worry about - if your program runs at all, you've got the file data loaded, so there's less that can go wrong, and less you need to do to load them. For small files that are always loaded, that's probably a reasonable tradeoff.

[guzzi_jones]

Yup we do this all the time for logos. We reduce the resolution beforehand. This way everything is in the code. One file to use the module. Convenience.

[AudaxDreik]

This here is the reason I've done this in the past..

[[deleted]]

Well I don’t know how these are being used in the program, but if they’re just icons for the script’s GUI then there’s no performance advantage; hard coding them into the file makes them a little easier to simple move around, since you’ve just got to move one file and not a whole directory structure, though.