Question

I have an image that I have created by combining images based on database data, and was wondering hw to convert that to base 64. I tried this but the characters returned can not be decoded into an image:

$encode ="data:image/png"; 
imagepng($image);
echo (base64_encode($encode));

I saw this among others but that requires a path that I don’t have. Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

The following will allow you to get the image data without having to create a temporary file (I’ve had nightmares with temporary files before when too many users were online…)

ob_start(function($c) {return "data:image/png;base64,".base64_encode($c);});
imagepng($image);
ob_end_flush();

This will output something similar to:

data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABAAAAAQAgMAAABinRfyAAAAAXNSR0IArs4c6QAAAAxQTFRFAGVygICA/8wz/+aZTn6FEAAAAAF0Uk5TAEDm2GYAAAABYktHRACIBR1IAAAACXBIWXMAAAsTAAALEwEAmpwYAAAAB3RJTUUH2wkZEwoSgxq4wwAAAB1pVFh0Q29tbWVudAAAAAAAQ3JlYXRlZCB3aXRoIEdJTVBkLmUHAAAAS0lEQVQI1w3EMQ3AMAwEwMdTEmWRSF68h0RQBIKl5vkUirdGX99wuKUPKkjJkfM4jueE+ivo7VW6wDCCq1VtEdtiIMY2BGlgwUU+P38ZK+RwskeQAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC

Which is suitable for use inside an <img src="..." />.

Edit For PHP < 5.3 without anonymous functions:

// Define the function first
function ob_base64_encode($c) {
  return "data:image/png;base64,".base64_encode($c);
}
// And pass its name as a string
ob_start('ob_base64_encode');
imagepng($image);
ob_end_flush();