PHP / MySQL – Strip Content And Only Display Images From A MySQL Table

This is another one of those quite specific pieces of code, so I doubt many people will need it. I think the code is quite useful, so I thought i’d make a post about it. Anyways, I’m going to show you how you can pull just images out of a field in a MySQL table. I used this code yesterday, to specifically pull out all images from a WordPress Blog – to look at all the images that have been posted in ALL articles.

What the following PHP/MySQL code will specifcally deliver…

• It will pull out ONLY images
• If one field has multiple images, it will display ALL of them

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//this query will only get the rows that have images in them
$sql =
"SELECT [field]
FROM [table]
WHERE [field] LIKE '%<img src=";
//execute the query
$result = mysql_query($sql);
//loop the results
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
 //this is the magic - preg_match matches all the images saves them into an array called images[]
 preg_match_all('/<img[^>]+>/i',$row['ENTER FIELD'],$images[]);
}
 
//echo out all the images
print_r($images);

That’s it! The print_r will show you all the images when you load the page. The preg_match_all line can actually be used with any string to pull out image references (or whatever regulat expression you require). I’m just specifcially demonstrating how I used it with WordPress/images.

If you don’t want to see the images, and just want to see the actual image URL’s, you can do the following…

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//put the images[] array into a foreach loop
foreach($images as $image)
{
  //because each entry may have multiple images, we have to loop through each row to get each image
  foreach($image[0] as $img)
  {
    //remove the <img> tag
    $img = str_replace('<img src="','', $img);
    //explode each image by double quotes (or single quotes depending on how you quote your images), so we know where the image URL ends!
    $img = explode('" ', $img);
    //rename the image URL to $file for ease
    $file = $img[0];
   //echo out each image URL
    echo $file . "<br />";;
  }
}

Please let mw know if anyone actually uses this code and how useful it was…