Question

How do I generate a pdf-file from a binary file retrieved from database in php5? It comes base64 encoded, and I just decoded it, but don’t know what to do next…

Answer 1

The binary data is simply the actual file, or rather the important contents of that file, just without file name.

$base64 = /* some base64 encoded data fetched from somewhere */;
$binary = base64_decode($base64);

And there you have the file data/contents of the file in the $binary variable. From here, it depends on what you want to do. You can write the data to a file, and you get an “actual” PDF file:

file_put_contents('my.pdf', $binary);

You can spit the data out to the browser with an appropriate header, and the user will receive something that looks like a PDF file to him:

header('Content-type: application/pdf');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="my.pdf"');
echo $binary;