6 replies to this topic

[The Creator]

Well what i want is very simple, how to get it might proove very hard.

I am getting image from external sites and i want to have a backup image which is displayed in its place in case that site doesn't have the image i'm requesting.

I want to do this in a basic way without too much code, is it possible?

thanks,

The Creator

[Demonslay]

You can do this to save the files if you aren't doing it manually.

$img = imagecreatefromjpeg('http://site.com/images/image.jpg');
imagejpeg($img, 'images//image.jpg');

If it is .png or .gif, you will have to use imagecreatefrompng/imagepng or imagecreatefromgif/imagegif, respectively. Or you can make a version that checks what the extension is to tell which functions to use.

More information.
http://www.php.net/image

Then, you can do something like this.

function show_image($image){
  if(file_exists('http://www.site.com/images/'.$image))
	return 'http://www.site.com/images/'.$image;
  else
	return '/images/'.$image;
}

echo '<img src="'.show_image('image.jpg').'" alt="" />';

Edited by Demonslay, 18 July 2007 - 09:31 PM.

[The Creator]

thanks for the help but im afraid to say ive already tried that...

i should have mentioned before that file_exists(); only works if the file is on your site...

[Matthew.]

Not sure if it's the best way, but you can replace file_exists with file_get_contents which supports external files...

[The Creator]

ill try that, thanks bud

[Demonslay]

My bad, I keep forgetting about that, lol.

Still, if you look on the manual page, you can still find plenty of ways to see if a URL exists, with and without the use of cURL.

[Ali Imran]

As Matthew directs, use file_get_contents, but make sure this function is availabe in your php distribution, to do this add following code on top of your code:

if(!function_exists('file_get_contents')) {
	function file_get_contents($filename) { 
	   $dataArr = @file($filename); 
	   if($dataArr === FALSE) return false;
	   return implode("",$dataArr);
	}
}

Secondly, calling specific function for each formats may result in large code, to avoid this, use imagecreatefromstring and pass it the image data you read through file_get_contents function. This way you script will accomodate all GD supported image formats.

Some error checking:

$data = file_get_contents("your image file link");
if(!$data)
	print "Error getting file contents!";
else {
	$res = @imagecreatefromstring($data);
	if($res === FALSE)
	   print "input data is not an image";
	else {
	   //yes it is image, do something
	}
}

I hope it helps.

regards

Edited by Ali Imran, 22 July 2007 - 06:00 PM.