Detecting image type from base64 string in PHP

Question

Is it possible to find out the type of an image encoded as a base64 String in PHP?

I have no method of accessing the original image file, just the encoded string. F

Answer 1

If you dont want to use these functions because of their dependencies you can use the first bytes of the data:

function getBytesFromHexString($hexdata)
{
  for($count = 0; $count < strlen($hexdata); $count+=2)
    $bytes[] = chr(hexdec(substr($hexdata, $count, 2)));

  return implode($bytes);
}

function getImageMimeType($imagedata)
{
  $imagemimetypes = array( 
    "jpeg" => "FFD8", 
    "png" => "89504E470D0A1A0A", 
    "gif" => "474946",
    "bmp" => "424D", 
    "tiff" => "4949",
    "tiff" => "4D4D"
  );

  foreach ($imagemimetypes as $mime => $hexbytes)
  {
    $bytes = getBytesFromHexString($hexbytes);
    if (substr($imagedata, 0, strlen($bytes)) == $bytes)
      return $mime;
  }

  return NULL;
}

$encoded_string = "....";
$imgdata = base64_decode($encoded_string);
$mimetype = getImageMimeType($imgdata);