In what situations would it be necessary to combine cURL with a image processing library like GD or ImageMagick for handling external images in PHP?
When handling external images in PHP, it may be necessary to combine cURL with an image processing library like GD or ImageMagick if you need to download an image from a remote server and then manipulate or process it in some way, such as resizing, cropping, or adding watermarks. cURL can be used to fetch the image from the external URL, and then GD or ImageMagick can be used to perform the necessary image processing tasks.
// Example code using cURL to download an image and GD to resize it
$url = 'https://example.com/image.jpg';
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$image_data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$image = imagecreatefromstring($image_data);
$width = imagesx($image);
$height = imagesy($image);
$new_width = 200;
$new_height = $height * ($new_width / $width);
$new_image = imagecreatetruecolor($new_width, $new_height);
imagecopyresampled($new_image, $image, 0, 0, 0, 0, $new_width, $new_height, $width, $height);
header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');
imagejpeg($new_image);
imagedestroy($image);
imagedestroy($new_image);