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Inserting a PDF into a MSQL database with PHP

April 9, 2009

I have in the past inserted images and other binary data into a MYSQL database using PHP with no problems. However now at my current job we needed to insert PDF’s into a MSQL server. Unfortunately google turns up relatively little searches on inserting binary data into MSQL database via PHP. Luckily after doing some serious research I’ve found a solution that works.

Normally with MYSQL you would open the file for reading and use addslashes to escape characters.

// Escape special characters in the file
$fileContents = AddSlashes($fileContents);

Unfortunately with MSQL you can’t do this. In order to store binary data you must use unpack().

$fileContents = file_get_contents($userfile);
$fileContents1 = unpack(“H*hex”, $fileContents);
$fileContents2 = “0x”.$fileContents1[hex];

Using this code you will properly read the binary data into a string that can then be inserted into the MSQL database. Oh and one more thing. When doing the insertion you need to concatenate the $fileContents2 in your sql statement. Otherwise it will not work.

‘$fileContents2 ‘ will not work.
\”$fileContents2\” will not work.
“.$fileContents2 .” works properly

For whatever reason the PDF docs I inserted came back as corrupted when pulled out of the database.

Hopefully this will help those of you trying to insert an image or other binary data into a MSQL database using PHP.

Written by grey580 · Filed Under Code 

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