Display Binary Images in a Single Script

Problem:

Can images be recreated and displayed directly from binary data in the same script? This involves processing the data with GD or similar tools before displaying it in an HTML image tag. The goal is to avoid saving the processed images to disk or using external scripts.

Solution:

This can be achieved using data URIs in the image source attribute. The data URI format is:

data:[][;charset=""][;base64],

This PHP function creates a data URI from a file:

function data_uri($file, $mime) 
{  
  $contents = file_get_contents($file);
  $base64   = base64_encode($contents); 
  return ('data:' . $mime . ';base64,' . $base64);
}

The following code displays an image using a data URI:

echo '';

Usage:

To display processed binary image data, you can use the data_uri function and output the resulting URI as the image source like this:

$imagedata1 = file_get_contents('assets/test.png');
$imagedata1 = process_using_gd_or_something($imagedata1);

echo '';

This code will display the processed image directly from the binary data without using external scripts or disk storage.