Images with no extension display strange characters

[meade999]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if someone could help me?

I have imported some products to my website and used a script that imports external images and saves them to my server. Some of the images do not have extensions, and if i try to view the image directly in the browser i get a whole page of this:

ÿØÿà�JFIF�


�H�H��ÿÛ�„�





















The images display fine in the backend of my website though, but just not when directly viewing the image in a browser.

Although as Im writing this, ive just noticed this only happens in forefox and not IE8.

Is this an apache thing and IE just recognises the error? Or is it a Firefox problem?

Any help would be much appreciated.

thanks

[g1smd]

Images should have an extension.

This tells the browser what type of image it is.

It is pages that can go extensionless.

[meade999]

Hi,

Thanks,

Is there any way of it not having an extension?

I cant control that, as the images are imported remotely and the remote servers images do not have extensions.

thanks

[g1smd]

Use the Live HTTP Headers extension for Firefox to investigate the MIME type details sent in the server response.

[jdMorgan]

Files should have extensions to tell the server what MIME-type to send with their content. It is the MIME-type sent in the HTTP Content-Type response header which tells the browser how to render the image.

In the case of your back-end-script-controlled image serving, the script is likely outputting this Content-Type header, but when you access the image directly (as a static resource), the server cannot identify the content-type because the file has no extension. it is likely being sent with a type of text/plain, resulting in the odd display on your screen.

Firefox (and all other HTTP-compliant browsers) rely on the Content-Type header. IE, on the other hand, ignores this header and actually looks at the content-body, and "figures out" what the content-type must be (or more accurately, what it probably must be, since it makes mistakes occasionally).

So the key here would be to declare a default MIME-type for extensionless files, but that will only work if all images are of the same type. If you are serving a mix of jpg, gif, and png, then there will be no good solution except to replicate the "figure it out" function of MSIE on the server-side -- Open the file, look at the first few bytes, and see if it has "GIF89A" or "JFIF" or whatever in it, and then use the script to send a correct Content-Type header along with the file contents.

You'll want to use a rewriterule to rewrite requests for extensionless URLs to this script.

Of course, none of this is needed unless you plan to serve those images directly, and not using your "back-end" script.

Jim