[RESOLVED] Create images from within current page

[Kudose]

Hello all.

I did a few searches but came up empty on this subject, although I may be blind. I know how to create an image and all that jazz ... but am having trouble figuring out how to generate the image on the fly (from inside a curent page) without it spitting out crap characters at me.

I know you need to use the header content type of image/png - but that makes my whole page just an output of the image, as expected.

I dont even know if this is possible due to headers, but this is what I am trying to do.

I have phone numbers stored in the DB that I want output as images to prevent scrapping. I dont really want to have to create an image, only to delete it after if it is output (copy from blank, put text in, display, delete).

Here is what I've got ...

$im = imagecreatetruecolor(25,100);
  $black = imagecolorallocate($im,255,255,255);
  $font = '/home/XxXxXxX/public_html/fonts/tahoma.ttf';
  imagettftext($im, 0, 0, 0, 0, $black, $font, $LINFO['phone']);
  $content .= '<td class="INV_INFO_TEXT">'.imagepng($im).'</td>';

Ideas are welcome as I doubt I will be able to get this to work the way I'd originally thought.

TIA.

[etully]

Make a PHP (or Perl) script called display_phon_num.php that:
1. takes in an ID #
2. looks up the phone number in the database associated with that id
3. outputs an image (header and content) based on that phone number

Now, assume you have a PHP page that displays HTML with this phone number image somewhere on the page. Just inlucde this in the HTML:

<img src="display_phon_num.php?id=42">

Of course, in your PHP page that generates that HTML, that line will look like this:

<img src="display_phon_num.php?id=<? print "$id"; ?>">

This way, if a bot scrapes the HTML, they don't see the phone number. If a human views the source, all they see is: <img src="display_phon_num.php?id=42"> which doesn't look anything like a phone number!

I hope I've understood your question correctly.

[Kudose]

Nice. I didnt know that you could call an image from a script like that.

Thanks.

Will post back an update for others.

[Kudose]

Works now. 🙂

This is MY code, but is easily changed for anyones needs:

view.php

//display <img> tag with ID in src attribute
$content .= '<img src="'.ROOT_URL.'/imagePhone.php/'.$item['locationID'].'" border="0">';

imagePhone.php

header('Content-type: image/png');
  /** Require config information */
  require_once('config.php');
  /* stuff here removed for post */   

  /** Require core data file */
  require_once('core.php');

  $ID = intval($PAGEVARS[0]);
  $PHONE = $db->result("SELECT fax FROM XxX WHERE locationID='$ID' LIMIT 1");
  $im = imagecreate(100,20);
  $black = imagecolorallocate($im,0,0,0);
  $white = imagecolorallocate($im,255,255,255);
  imagefill($im,0,0,$white);
  imagestring($im, 3, 0, 3,  $PHONE, $black);
  imagepng($im);
  imagedestroy($im);