php send a binary response of curl to client

Question

I use php curl to send a REST request to geoserver and get a binary response.

 $curl = curl_init();
    $url = 'http://localhost:8080/geoserver/worksp/wms';
    $query_str = "service=WMS&LAYERS=" . $_GET['LAYERS'] . "&TRANSPARENT=" . $_GET['TRANSPARENT'] . "&VERSION=" . $_GET['VERSION'] . "&REQUEST=" . $_GET['REQUEST'] . "&STYLES=" . $_GET['STYLES'] ;
    $query = $url . '?' . $query_str;
    //var_dump($query);
    curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1,
        CURLOPT_URL => $query,
        CURLOPT_USERAGENT => 'Codular Sample cURL Request',
        CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER => true,
        CURLOPT_HEADER => false
    ));
    set_time_limit(30);                     // set time in secods for PHP
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "admin:geoserver");
    $response = curl_exec($curl);
    curl_close($curl);

the server sends me a png image as a binary data an I save it in the $response variable.
Now, $response in the above code is a binary data of a png image. how can I send it to client without saving it as a file?
Another question is that, what is the data type of $response ?

Answer 1

You can save the binary data as a file and then send it to the client:

// place the above code here
    $saveTo = "c:\\temp.png";
    if (file_exists($saveTo)) {
        unlink($saveTo);
    }
    $fp = fopen($saveTo, 'wb');
    fwrite($fp, $resp);
    fclose($fp);

    header("Content-type:image/png");
    $fp = fopen($saveTo, 'rb');
    fpassthru($fp);
    exit();

or you can use echo:

echo $response;