I would like to stop spambots from harvesting email addresses on my website by making the emails images in php. I found a script on another site but can't seem to get it to work. Here's the script:

<?PHP 
 
// Set your string somehow 
$string = 'your@example.com'; 
 
// Set font size 
$font_size = 4; 
 
// Create image width dependant on width of the string 
$width  = imagefontwidth($font_size)*strlen($string); 
// Set height to that of the font 
$height = imagefontheight($font_size); 
// Create the image pallette 
$img = imagecreate($width,$height); 
// Grey background 
$bg    = imagecolorallocate($img, 25, 25, 25); 
// White font color 
$color = imagecolorallocate($img, 255, 255, 255); 
// Length of the string 
$len = strlen($string); 
// Y-coordinate of character, X changes, Y is static 
$ypos = 0; 
// Loop through the string 
for($i=0;$i<$len;$i++){ 
    // Position of the character horizontally 
    $xpos = $i * imagefontwidth($font_size); 
    // Draw character 
    imagechar($img, $font_size, $xpos, $ypos, $string, $color); 
    // Remove character from string 
    $string = substr($string, 1);     
     
} 
// Return the image 
header("Content-Type: image/gif"); 
imagegif($img); 
// Remove image  
imagedestroy($img); 
 
?>

Does anyone have any experience with this?

Can you define "can't seem to get it to work"? I just ran the code on my server and it generated the image just fine. Note that if you have any output other than the image it won't work correctly.

To display images generated by this script you'll either need to store them somewhere, or have them generated on the fly in a separate script. Like this for example:

<img src="/path/to/generator.php?email=test@test.com" />

generator.php

PHP Code:

$string = $_GET['email'];
// .
// .
// . 


Of course passing the email as a GET parameter to the script kind of defeats the purpose since bots will be able to read it.

Note that if you have any output other than the image it won't work correctly.

That was my problem. Thanks!