Saving image from PHP URL

Question

I need to save an image from a PHP URL to my PC. Let\'s say I have a page, http://example.com/image.php, holding a single \"flower\" image, nothing else. How ca

Answer 1

None of the answers here mention the fact that a URL image can be compressed (gzip), and none of them work in this case.

There are two solutions that can get you around this:

The first is to use the cURL method and set the curl_setopt CURLOPT_ENCODING, '':

// ... image validation ...

// Handle compression & redirection automatically
$ch = curl_init($image_url);
$fp = fopen($dest_path, 'wb');

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
// Exclude header data
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
// Follow redirected location
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
// Auto detect decoding of the response | identity, deflate, & gzip
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, '');

curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);
fclose($fp);

It works, but from hundreds of tests of different images (png, jpg, ico, gif, svg), it is not the most reliable way.

What worked out best is to detect whether an image url has content encoding (e.g. gzip):

// ... image validation ...

// Fetch all headers from URL
$data = get_headers($image_url, true);

// Check if content encoding is set
$content_encoding = isset($data['Content-Encoding']) ? $data['Content-Encoding'] : null;

// Set gzip decode flag
$gzip_decode = ($content_encoding == 'gzip') ? true : false;

if ($gzip_decode)
{
    // Get contents and use gzdecode to "unzip" data
    file_put_contents($dest_path, gzdecode(file_get_contents($image_url)));
}
else
{
    // Use copy method
    copy($image_url, $dest_path);
}

For more information regarding gzdecode see this thread. So far this works fine. If there's anything that can be done better, let us know in the comments below.