This tutorial explains the basics of uploading images or files to your server using a HTML form and the PHP function copy. I haven't explained form validation or file checking - I'll go into further detail on that in future tutorials. To kick things off, you'll need a HTML form:
As Web pages have moved from static documents into dynamic database-driven applications, users are looking for the ability to upload data in the form of files. In today's article, we'll be looking at how files can be uploaded and then processed in PHP.
Let's assume that your Web site is devoted to a community of graphic artists from all backgrounds. As your site grew, you started devoting a section to displaying your members' works.
Until now, a member would send his or her contribution to an e-mail address listed on the Web site, and from there the image would be manually processed and added. With PHP 4, not only can your members upload images from the Web site directly, but also the majority of the processing that was done manually can now be automated. Here's how browser-based file uploading works:
In spite of security issues that should be addressed before enabling file uploads, the actual mechanisms to allow this are straight forward. In this tutorial we will consider how to upload files to some directory on your Web server. We will also discuss security issues concerned with the file uploading.
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