image uploading

Anon

I am a novice with php and html. I have been working with the code in the "PHP, MySQL and images" article. I have gotten everything working except for the image upload. here is what I now have...

<form enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post" action="<?php echo $PHP_SELF ?>">
Denotes a required field<br><br>
Link Address <br> <input type="Text" name="address" size="70" maxlength="70" value="http://"><br>
Site/Link Name *<br> <input type="Text" name="name" size="30" maxlength="30"><br>
Link Image<br><input type="file" name="image" size="30" maxlength="30">
<br><br><input type="submit" name="submit" value="Upload">

<input type="reset" name="reset" value="Reset The Form">

</form>

<?php
$database="myDatabase";
$hostname="localhost";
$username="myUsername";
$password="myPassword";

if ($submit) {

$db = mysql_connect("$hostname","$username","$password")
                     or die ("Couldn't connect to server.");

mysql_select_db("$database",$db)
                 or die ("Couldn't connect to DataBase."); 

mysql_query("INSERT INTO HyperLinks (address, name, image)
                VALUES ('$address', '$name', '$image')
           "); 

exec("cp $image image/$image_name");


echo "address: $address<br>\n"; 
echo "name: $name<br>\n"; 
echo "temp file: $image<br>\n"; 
echo "file name: $image_name<br>\n"; 
echo "file size: $image_size<br>\n"; 
echo "file type: $image_type<br>\n"; 
echo "<br>\n"; 
echo "<img src=/image/$image_name><br>\n";

}

I placed an "or die" after [[ exec("cp $image image/$image_name"); ]] and found out that this line was failing. I noticed that the line [[ echo "temp file: $image<br>\n"; ]] would output " temp file: /tmp/phpsomerandomnumber ". I am wondering if this mystery /tmp/ directory is where my files are going.. I can't find them on my client or server drive??? The line [[ echo "<img src=/image/$image_name><br>\n"; ]] just displays the broken image icon. I checked some of the discussions here and the w3c.org site and found limited info on the encdata setting and the input tag. I'm just not sure where to look next. BTW my hosting companies server runs RH Linux so I believe the syntax of the copy command is correct. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Anon

in php there is function to do this you don't need to exec a server command. When you first post your form the image is upploaded to a temp location on your server, that is the weird thing you stated. You need to copy from there to its final resting placeusing

copy($image, "images/".$image_name);

Anon

Thank you for that suggestion. I changed my script accordingly and it is almost working. I say almost because the file upload is attempted but breaks when it runs into the directory permissions. This is a good thing! I don't want my /images/ directory world writable. However, I'm not sure how to give the copy command a valid username and password so that it can write to the directory. I checked the php manual and in the section defining the copy command it says that you can use authentication but it does not say how. Thanks again for the previous help and any help that can be offered on this is greatly appreciated.

Anon

hello there!!
charles please can you help me with your problem..
i have tried your script http://www.worldrallying.com/image_upload/index.php
but you will see the problem i am having..no image displyed an dno description..
does you script upload the image to a folder called image and then the database tells it the name of the image within that folder??

also if u dont mind please could you tell me the spec of your table , like in your example do you just have the fields address, name and image which are all just varchar ?

your help would be most appreciated
regards..
naveed
naveed@nownet.co.uk

packetgeek

I changed direction a little bit in my final solution. After reading some other posts here at PHPBuilder I decided not to use the exec statement because that relies on priveledges my account apparently does not have on my hosted site. I removed the exec statement and replaced it with a copy command and placed an if-else statement around it all to ensure that only files with a gif extention are uploaded. Here's how it looks:

if($image_type == "image/gif")
{

copy($image, "/home/pcktgeek/packet-matrix-www/images/".$image_name);

    echo "address: $address<br>\n"; 
    echo "name: $name<br>\n"; 
    echo "temp file: $image<br>\n"; 
    echo "file name: $image_name<br>\n"; 
    echo "file size: $image_size<br>\n"; 
    echo "file type: $image_type<br>\n"; 
    echo "<br>\n"; 
    echo "<img src=/images/$image_name><br>\n";
}
else echo "$image_name is of type $image_type and this page will only upload files of .gif type<br>\n";

And yes those table columns are the varchar data type.