Question

I have a PHP file and an image in the same directory. How could I get the PHP file to set it’s headers as jpeg and ‘pull’ the image into it. So if I went to file.php it would show the image. If I rewrite file.php to file_created.jpg and it needs to work.

Answer 1

Rather than use file_get_contents as suggested by another answer, use readfile and output out some more HTTP headers to play nicely:

   <?php     $filepath= '/home/foobar/bar.gif'     header('Content-Type: image/gif');     header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($filepath));     readfile($file);    ?> 

readfile reads the data from the file and writes direct to the output buffer, whereas file_get_contents would first pull the entire file into memory and then output it. Using readfile makes a big difference if the file is very large.

If you wanted to get cuter, you could output the last modified time, and check the incoming http headers for the If-Modified-Since header, and return an empty 304 response to tell the browser they already have the current version….here’s a fuller example showing how you might do that:

$filepath= '/home/foobar/bar.gif'  $mtime=filemtime($filepath);  $headers = apache_request_headers();  if (isset($headers['If-Modified-Since']) &&      (strtotime($headers['If-Modified-Since']) >= $mtime))  {     // Client's cache IS current, so we just respond '304 Not Modified'.     header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', $mtime).' GMT', true, 304);     exit; }   header('Content-Type:image/gif'); header('Content-Length: '.filesize($filepath)); header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', $mtime).' GMT'); readfile($filepath);