Question

I wrote:

$im = imagecreatefromstring($im_string);        
return imagegif($im,'a.gif');

The content of variable $im_string I get from a ZIP file.
It should work, but it returns ‘1’.

Why is the reason?

Answer 1

The imagegif function returns a boolean, so a return value of 1 would indicate that it was successful.

If you need to return the actual image data, you need pass the second parameter as well and read the data from the file, or buffer the output of the function.

<?php
ob_start();
$im = imagecreatefromstring($im_string);        
imagegif($im);
$img_data = ob_get_clean();

return $img_data;
?>

Or:

<?php
$im = imagecreatefromstring($im_string);        
imagegif($im, 'a.gif');

$img_data = file_get_contents('a.gif');

return $img_data;
?>