Question

I would like to know the best way to save an image from a URL in php.

At the moment I am using

file_put_contents($pk, file_get_contents($PIC_URL)); 

which is not ideal. I am unable to use curl. Is there a method specifically for this?

Answer 1

Using file_get_contents is fine, unless the file is very large. In that case, you don’t really need to be holding the entire thing in memory.

For a large retrieval, you could fopen the remote file, fread it, say, 32KB at a time, and fwrite it locally in a loop until all the file has been read.

For example:

$fout = fopen('/tmp/verylarge.jpeg', 'w'); $fin = fopen('http://www.example.com/verylarge.jpeg', 'rb'); while (!feof($fin)) {     $buffer= fread($fin, 32*1024);     fwrite($fout,$buffer); } fclose($fin); fclose($fout); 

(Devoid of error checking for simplicity!)

Alternatively, you could forego using the url wrappers and use a class like PEAR’s HTTP_Request, or roll your own HTTP client code using fsockopen etc. This would enable you to do efficient things like send If-Modified-Since headers if you are maintaining a cache of remote files.