Question

I want to serve an existing file to the browser in PHP.
I’ve seen examples about image/jpeg but that function seems to save a file to disk and you have to create a right sized image object first (or I just don’t understand it :))

In asp.net I do it by reading the file in a byte array and then call context.Response.BinaryWrite(bytearray), so I’m looking for something similar in PHP.

Michel

Answer 1

There is fpassthru() that should do exactly what you need. See the manual entry to read about the following example:

<?php

// open the file in a binary mode
$name = './img/ok.png';
$fp = fopen($name, 'rb');

// send the right headers
header("Content-Type: image/png");
header("Content-Length: " . filesize($name));

// dump the picture and stop the script
fpassthru($fp);
exit;

?>

See here for all of PHP’s filesystem functions.

If it’s a binary file you want to offer for download, you probably also want to send the right headers so the "Save as.." dialog pops up. See the 1st answer to this question for a good example on what headers to send.