Reading raw messages from Amazon SQS using boto

Question

By default, boto encodes messages with Base64 before the messages are sent to SQS. Example code:

conn = boto.connect_sqs('access_key_id', 'secret_key') 
q = conn.get_queue('myqueue')
m = Message()
m.set_body('hello!')
q.write(m)

By replacing Message() with RawMessage(), I can send raw messages to the queue without encoding. But how do I read messages from the queue without decoding? If I use the following code:

rs = q.get_messages(1)
if rs:
    m = rs[0]
    print m.get_body()

m.get_body() automatically returns the decoded result. Is there a way to retrieve raw messages?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The constructor of boto.sqs.queue.Queue has a message_class argument, which you could set to RawMessage. On the other hand, I don't see why it could ever make sense to not encode that data before transmitting it.

Answer 2

In case you are interested to just read the messages off SQS queue and the producer was someone else, you may start seeing garbage character when call get_messages(). See https://github.com/boto/boto/issues/831

Solution in this case again, is to

from boto.sqs.message import RawMessage
q.set_message_class(RawMessage)

Answer 3

Actually Message class inherits from RawMessage, so it has all of it's methods. One of these methods is:

get_body_encoded()

This method is really a semi-private method used by the Queue.write method when writing the contents of the message to SQS. You probably shouldn’t need to call this method in the normal course of events.