PHP Conference Nagoya 2025

imagechar

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

imagecharDraw a character horizontally

Description

imagechar(
    GdImage $image,
    GdFont|int $font,
    int $x,
    int $y,
    string $char,
    int $color
): bool

imagechar() draws the first character of char in the image identified by image with its upper-left at x,y (top left is 0, 0) with the color color.

Parameters

image

A GdImage object, returned by one of the image creation functions, such as imagecreatetruecolor().

font

Can be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 for built-in fonts in latin2 encoding (where higher numbers corresponding to larger fonts) or GdFont instance, returned by imageloadfont().

x

x-coordinate of the start.

y

y-coordinate of the start.

char

The character to draw.

color

A color identifier created with imagecolorallocate().

Return Values

Returns true on success or false on failure.

Changelog

Version Description
8.1.0 The font parameter now accepts both an GdFont instance and an int; previously only int was accepted.
8.0.0 image expects a GdImage instance now; previously, a valid gd resource was expected.

Examples

Example #1 imagechar() example

<?php

$im
= imagecreate(100, 100);

$string = 'PHP';

$bg = imagecolorallocate($im, 255, 255, 255);
$black = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 0, 0);

// prints a black "P" in the top left corner
imagechar($im, 1, 0, 0, $string, $black);

header('Content-type: image/png');
imagepng($im);

?>

The above example will output something similar to:

Output of example : imagechar()

See Also

add a note

User Contributed Notes 2 notes

up
3
sw at profilschmiede dot de
19 years ago
For the sake of completeness, here is an example for imagechar.
The base-image automatically adjusts to the size and the height of the given string. Using the rand()-function the y-position of each char is slightly varied with every loop-run. You can easily rewrite the script to use a randomly generated string - the one given here just serves as an example.

<?php

$string
= '1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G';
$font_size = 5;
$width=imagefontwidth($font_size)*strlen($string);
$height=imagefontheight($font_size)*2;
$img = imagecreate($width,$height);
$bg = imagecolorallocate($img,225,225,225);
$black = imagecolorallocate($img,0,0,0);
$len=strlen($string);

for(
$i=0;$i<$len;$i++)
{
$xpos=$i*imagefontwidth($font_size);
$ypos=rand(0,imagefontheight($font_size));
imagechar($img,$font_size,$xpos,$ypos,$string,$black);
$string = substr($string,1);

}
header("Content-Type: image/gif");
imagegif($img);
imagedestroy($img);
?>
up
-3
liam dot wiltshire at lineone dot net
15 years ago
A quick function to automatically generate a multi line image from a string, with the image size automatically calculated from the string itself.

<?php

function multilineimage($string){

// Probably not the best way of handling newlines, but bar OS9, doesn't really cause a problem
$string = str_replace("\r","",$string);
$string = explode("\n",$string);

$maxlen = 0;
foreach (
$string as $str){
if (
strlen($str) > $maxlen){
$maxlen = strlen($str);
}
}

// Set font size
$font_size = 4;

// Create image width dependant on width of the string
$width = imagefontwidth($font_size)*$maxlen;
// Set height to that of the font
$height = imagefontheight($font_size) * count($string);
// Create the image pallette
$img = imagecreate($width,$height);
// Grey background
$bg = imagecolorallocate($img, 205, 255, 255);
// White font color
$color = imagecolorallocate($img, 0, 0, 0);

$ypos = 0;

foreach (
$string as $str){

$len = strlen($str);
for(
$i=0;$i<$len;$i++){
// Position of the character horizontally
$xpos = $i * imagefontwidth($font_size);
// Draw character
imagechar($img, $font_size, $xpos, $ypos, $str, $color);
// Remove character from string
$str = substr($str, 1);
}
$ypos = $ypos + imagefontheight($font_size);
}

// Return the image
header("Content-Type: image/gif");
imagegif($img);
// Remove image
imagedestroy($img);
}

multilineimage("This is an image
This is line 2\nLine 3
Line 4"
);

?>
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