Saving IMAP XLS Attchements with PHP
I have written a script to check my Gmail account and extract XLS file attachments from the message. I am using the following code to grab the attachment from the body:
$mege = imap_fetchbody($connection,$message_number,2);
The message is being retrieved just fine. Here is a sample of the output for the above code:
-Apple-Mail=_9EBAFC63-4E12-4E64-A4F9-F8D5834F3523 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii --Apple-Mail=_9EBAFC63-4E12-4E64-A4F9-F8D5834F3523 Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=test.xls Content-Type: application/octet-stream; x-mac-type=584C5338; x-mac-creator=5843454C; x-unix-mode=0644; name="test.xls" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 0M8R4KGxGuEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPgADAP7/CQAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAAAQAAAAAAAAAA EAAAIQAAAAEAAAD+////AAAAAAAAAAD///////////////////////////////////////////// //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// ///////////////bABpAGIAcgBpADEAHgDwAAAACACQAQAAAAIA2gcBQwBhAGwAaQBiAHIAaQAxAB4A8AAAAAgAkAEA...
This is expected since the XLS file is base64 encoded. However, when i decode the message and save to a file, I am getting an empty excel file. But, it is an excel file.
I am using this to decode the content before writing to a file:
$message=imap_base64($mege);
I am wondering if there is anything more I am supposed to be doing to the attachment in order to populate the file.
Answer
Solution:
You are fetching the full body of a mail message, not just the attachment. What is missing is the code to parse the MIME structure, locate the actual interesting part, extract that part from the MIME container and only after that decode according to the
Content-Transfer-Encodingheader (your "base64" in this particular case). You just cannot blindly base64-decode the whole body and hope to get an attachment in return.