Printing an Image From a File to the Browser...

joshua has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I need to open a .gif or .jpg file and print it to the browser called from an img tag. I can't use a redirect because the image will be in a directory not viewable by the public. (Not in the public_html dir.)

HTML File:
<img src="image.pl">

image.pl:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;
open(IMAGE, "x.gif") || error_stuff();
print "Content-type: image/gif\n\n" . <IMAGE>;
close(IMAGE);
[download]

Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks
Joshua

Comment on Printing an Image From a File to the Browser... Select or Download Code

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Re: Printing an Image From a File to the Browser... by dws (Chancellor) on Jun 14, 2002 at 23:42 UTC
You're probably getting tripped up by `print "Content-type: image/gif\n\n" . <IMAGE>;` which is going to give you the first "line" of the image. The concatenation operator forces scalar context onto `<IMAGE>`, which isn't what you want. `print "Content-type: image/gif\n\n"; binmode(IMAGE); print <IMAGE>;` [download] should do it for you. (I threw in the binmode() in the unlikely event that you're running on Win32.)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: Printing an Image From a File to the Browser... by joshua (Pilgrim) on Jun 15, 2002 at 00:45 UTC
I threw in the binmode() in the unlikely event that you're running on Win32. God Forbid! :) Joshua	[reply]
Re: Printing an Image From a File to the Browser... by r0b (Pilgrim) on Jun 14, 2002 at 23:25 UTC
Try Print Image File and display gif image. ~~rob ____________________________________________________________ `eval pack "h*", "072796e647022245d445f475454494c5e622b3";`	[reply]
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