Lua

Get an Attachment's Bytes into a BinData

Demonstrates the Chilkat Email.GetAttachmentBd method, which copies an attachment's binary data into a BinData object. The first attachment is at index 0. This example adds an attachment and copies its bytes into a BinData, printing the byte count.

Background: This is the safe, binary way to extract an attachment — the counterpart to the text-oriented GetAttachmentString. Because attachments are often binary (PDFs, images, archives), copying the raw bytes into a BinData preserves them exactly, ready to write to a file, hash, or pass to another API without any charset conversion that could corrupt the data.

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Lua

local chilkat = require("chilkat")

-- Demonstrates the GetAttachmentBd method, which copies an attachment's binary data into a
-- BinData object.  The first attachment is at index 0.

local email = chilkat.Email.new()
email.subject = "GetAttachmentBd example"

email:add_string_attachment("notes.txt", "Some notes stored in the attachment.")

-- Copy the first attachment's binary data into a BinData object.
local bd = chilkat.BinData.new()
local success = email:get_attachment_bd(0, bd)
if not success then
    print(email.last_error_text)
    return
end

print("Attachment size (bytes) = " .. bd.num_bytes)