using images as data

kingvolcano

i hope someone here knows how to deal with this... i've been asked to write a script that returns an image. basically, a webserver will call a script on our site passing parameters to the image. i'm going to save these parameters then display the image. the trick is i'm not sure how to get started on this. i know a lot of advertisers use this trick (embedding a 1px gif that passes params- and no, this isn't for advertising)- i've seen things like img src="script.cgi?name=blah&lname=bling". but i'm not sure how to get it to work... does this make sense? how do i make the first part of the script make the call (if i do img src=myscript.php nothing happens)? can anybody help me out here? thanks in advance.

zevacronet

what kind of parameters are you going to be passing, give me an example. shouldn't be too hard.

kingvolcano

actually i figured it out for myself - i had the content-type set on the script, but the image wouldn't appear. i just used the include function on the image within the script and it all worked. thanks very much for your response, though.

tryangle

Originally posted by kingvolcano
actually i figured it out for myself - i had the content-type set on the script, but the image wouldn't appear. i just used the include function on the image within the script and it all worked. thanks very much for your response, though.

Are you saying that you added the include in here? src="script.php?name=blah&lname=bling include('script.php');" I tried that but got nothing. 🙁

kingvolcano

not quite like that. here's how i did it. i had a page, say, test.html, that required the image. so on that page i had

img src="script.php?foo=bar"

then script.php looked something like:

//bunch of stuff to process variables

header("Content-type: image/jpeg");
include("myImage.jpeg");

and voila- the script handled the variables and returned an image to the calling html page.

hope that helps.

tryangle

Thanks for getting back to me on this...

I started out with something simple to test it out..........
Test.php

Script.php

<?php echo($foo); ?>
<?php include($foo); ?>

But I still get nothing.

kingvolcano

if the script.php you're showing here is complete, then it's because you're not setting the content type- to display an image you have to set the content type to the image type you are including. also, even if you are setting the content type using the echo command will create an error- the text you're writing isn't an image, after all ;-).

anyway, here is a complete, copied and pasted, entirely working script:

test.html

script.php

<?php
header("Content-type: image/gif");
include("image.gif");
?>

and that should be in. you can pass querystring params to the page, perhaps to save to a database, but you cannot echo them.

hope this helps.

kingvolcano

oh, and if you're trying to pass the name of the image for the script to include, you could do something like

<body>

</body>
</html>

script.php

<?php
header("Content-type: image/gif");
include($img);
?>

but unless you're processing some other variables with the script, this is a strange way to include an image- normally you would just do <img src="<?php echo($img); ?>" />.

tryangle

I've been so swamped since the weekend that I haven't had an opportunity to see how it works. But hopefully I will get to it soon. I appreciate you getting back to me on this...

thanks again.