PHP create image to display email address?

Question

Using PHP: How can I create an image to display an email address (to help reduce spam)?

Meaning, if I want to display "joe@example.com" on my web page, since crawlers can easily find that text - I want to display the email address as an image that says "joe@example.com".

How do I do that? I want the font to be:

• color: #20c
• font: 11px normal tahoma

Answer 1

A simple search that you could easily do....

However: (color, font and string not the ones you specified)

header("Content-type: image/png");
$im = @imagecreate(110, 20)
    or die("Cannot Initialize new GD image stream");
$background_color = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 0, 0);
$text_color = imagecolorallocate($im, 233, 14, 91);
imagestring($im, 1, 5, 5,  "A Simple Text String", $text_color);
imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);

Relevant function definitions:

php.net/imagecreate

php.net/imagestring

Answer 2

Use these:

• header, to tell the browser to expect an image instead of HTML (PHP's default). The image function doc pages have more information about this.
• imagettfbbox, to find out the required size for the image
• imagecreatetruecolor, to create the image resource
• imagecolorallocate, to allocate a color for the text
• imagettftext, to draw the text (read the example, it's almost all you need)
• imagepng, to output the image to the browser

Answer 3

You should use gd image processing library.

Answer 4

If you are only doing this for one address you should not be doing this dynamically everytime the page loads for performance reasons. If this is the case you can find amny email obfuscator online such as this one:

http://digitalcolony.com/lab/maskemail/maskemail.aspx