saving remote files locally in PHP

[scorpion]

Suppose you have a remote image file at:
[remoteserver.com...]

Does anybody know a PHP code that will "download and save" this file to your server? Does your server directory have to have a particular chmod permission too?

[DrDoc]

You can use something like fopen [php.net]...

And yes, you need write permissions for the folder in question...

[scorpion]

yes but fopen opens a remote file for reading and then you can say echo it or something, how do you physically save the file to your server so that later on you can refer to it from their? I don't mean like a cache, I mean you specify the location on your server where the file is to be saved...

[toadhall]

You could use the GD library (if it's available on your server) for pngs and jpegs. Major limitation is the latest versions of GD won't handle gifs due to copyright. But,...

ImageCreateFromPng() [php.net], ImagePng()
ImageCreateFromJpeg(), ImageJpeg()
ImageDestroy()

T

[DrDoc]

Use fopen [php.net] in combination with fwrite [php.net]

[DrDoc]

Also, check the links on the left side...

[scorpion]

fwrite seems to write strings to a file pointer...can it write an image to a file pointer? What I want to do is save a file opened using fopen to my local server through PHP.

fwrite($localfilehandle, "http://www.remoteserver.com/image.jpg") will work?

[DrDoc]

First you must open the local file for writing, using fopen [php.net]. Then you can retreive the file using readfile [php.net], file [php.net], fputs [php.net]... whichever you like best. Just write the data to the local file, using fwrite [php.net], and close the file using fclose [php.net].

There's a simple example on the fwrite page. You have other examples on the file and fopen pages.

[scorpion]

oh I see, so you read the JPG file line by line as a string then put it to the stream because it is binary-safe..good idea!

[grahamstewart]

You don't read it line by line, you read it chunk by chunk.
Use

fread( $fp, 4096 )

or

fgets( $fp, 4096 )

And make sure that you specify 'rb' when fopening the input file and 'wb' when fopening the output. The 'b' sets it to binary mode - which can matter on some systems.

[grahamstewart]

Also see this recent thread [webmasterworld.com]