PHPMaster.com has posted the second part of their series covering connecting PHP to a legacy Access database. In part one they introduced you to working with the data and how to extract the object. In this new part they look at specific file types and how to pull out their data.

In this second part we’ll learn how to extract Acrobat PDF documents and take a brief look at a selection of image formats. The only similarity that PDF, GIF, PNG, etc., have when stored in an Access database is that they are all wrapped in an OLE container consisting of a variable length header and trailer. As we shall see, the trailer can be ignored as it was with the package discussed in Part 1. The header is more useful, but doesn’t contain all the information we need.

They get into the details of the headers for each type of object and include screenshots of what they look like in a hex viewer. The code for the complete class is included in the post, making it easy to drop in and get started with your transition from database object to external file.