Can Images Be Displayed Directly from Binary Data Using Data URIs?

Creating and Displaying Images from Binary Data

Can you create and display images from binary data directly in a single script? This question stems from a desire to handle image processing and display without relying on external scripts or writing images to disk.

The answer lies in using data URIs. Data URIs follow a specific format:

data:[<MIME-type>][;charset="<encoding>"][;base64],<data>

MIME types specify the format of the data, such as image/png or image/jpeg. The charset and base64 are optional. The actual data is represented in base64 encoding.

To generate a data URI from binary data, you can use a function like the following:

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

With this function, you can then use the data URI as the src attribute of an image:

<img src="<?php echo data_uri('elephant.png','image/png'); ?>" alt="An elephant" />

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