Chris Morrell

Microsoft Passport was a good idea. OpenID is a better idea. Gravatar is a good idea. Pavatar is a better idea. I think whenever a system can be open and decentralized, it should be (see my upcoming post on decentralized Twitter). For those of you who like the idea and want to use it, here’s a quick and dirty PHP method to get the Pavatar image for a given URL (supports all three Pavatar techniques)…

/**
 * Determines a URL's associated Pavatar (http://pavatar.com/)
 * Returns a URL on success, FALSE on failure
 * Does NOT verify that the URL is a valid image
 *
 * @author Chris Morrell (http://cmorrell.com)
 * @param string $url
 * @return mixed
 */
function getPavatar($url)
{
    // Grab Data
    $curl = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    $page = curl_exec($curl);
    curl_close($curl);

    // On Fail
    if (!$page)
    {
        return false;
    }

    // X-Pavatar Header Method
    elseif (preg_match('/X-Pavatar:\s*(.*?)(\s|\n)/i', $page, $matches))
    {
        return $matches[1];
    }

    // <link> Method
    elseif (preg_match('/<link.*?rel="pavatar".*?>/i', $page, $matches))
    {
        preg_match('/href="(.*?)"/i', $matches[0], $matches);
        return $matches[1];
    }

    // Default URL Method
    else
    {
        $info = parse_url($url);
        return "{$info['scheme']}://{$info['host']}/pavatar.png";
    }
}

Usage:

$pavatar = getPavatar('http://cmorrell.com');

Enjoy!

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