There's a common requirement to manage binary data - upload from a user, store, bring back in a web page. And where you have a substantial number of pieces of data - a lot of .pdf documents, .jpg or .gif images, or even Word documents, you'll wish to store them in a database with the potential for keyword and title fields to help in your indexing, and for efficiency of data structure.

Forms can easily be written to upload binary files - although you do need to remember to set the encoding type. PHP can handle the received data and put it to an SQL database ... and can front the retreival too. The code is short in each case, but I wouldn't say it's simple - you need to understand a lot of what's going on. If you would like to look at my scripts to learn from them ... they're available:

Upload form
Script to store uploaded .pdf to a database
Script to return latest .pdf for you to view

You're even welcome to try out the scripts - upload form which runs the store script when submitted and retreive latest .pdf.

Note - (a) This will also work with .jpg and .gif files if you change the header call in the pdfget script. (b) Please be careful what you upload in our test script - until another upload is done, the world can read it. (c) We offer an alternative image upload example here with more useful tips on binary data upload and handling.
(written 2006-12-19 23:26:29)

 H110 - PHP - HTML Web Page Data Handling

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Stirling at night
Old dog, old tricks
Room at the Inn, Guy at the station
Meet the neighbours
.pdf files - upload via PHP, store in MySQL, retrieve
One Thousand Posts and still going strong
Cascading and the buses
The year of the exploding projector
Most recent file in a directory - PHP
Setting your colour theme through PHP
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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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