What is the best practice for combining text and image output in PHP to avoid errors?

When combining text and image output in PHP, it's important to ensure that the image is generated before any text output is sent to the browser. To avoid errors, you can use output buffering to capture the image data first and then output the text content afterwards. 

<?php
ob_start(); // Start output buffering

// Generate image
$image = imagecreate(200, 200);
$bg_color = imagecolorallocate($image, 255, 255, 255);
$text_color = imagecolorallocate($image, 0, 0, 0);
imagestring($image, 5, 50, 50, "Hello World", $text_color);

// Output image
header('Content-Type: image/png');
imagepng($image);

// Capture image data
$image_data = ob_get_clean();

// Output text content
echo "This is a text message.";

// Output image data
echo '<img src="data:image/png;base64,' . base64_encode($image_data) . '" />';

imagedestroy($image);
?>

Keywords

image processing text output error handling PHP functions image manipulation

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