PHP GD: How to get imagedata as binary string?

Question

I\'m using a solution for assembling image files to a zip and streaming it to browser/Flex application. (ZipStream by Paul Duncan, http://pablotron.org/software/zipstream-ph

Answer 1

One way is to tell GD to output the image, then use PHP buffering to capture it to a string:

$imagedata = imagecreatefrompng($imagefile);
ob_start();
imagepng($imagedata);
$stringdata = ob_get_contents(); // read from buffer
ob_end_clean(); // delete buffer
$zdata = gzdeflate($stringdata);