Detecting image type from base64 string in PHP

Is it possible to find out the type of an image encoded as a base64 String in PHP?

I have no method of accessing the original image file, just the encoded string. From what I've seen, imagecreatefromstring() can create an image resource from a string representation (after it's been decoded from base64), but it automatically detects the image type and the image resource itself is a special PHP representation. In case I want to save the image as a file again, I would have no idea if the type I am saving it as corresponds to the original type from which the String representation was created.

FileInfo can do that for you:

$encoded_string = "....";
$imgdata = base64_decode($encoded_string);

$f = finfo_open();

$mime_type = finfo_buffer($f, $imgdata, FILEINFO_MIME_TYPE);

If you dont want to use these functions because of their dependencies you can use the first bytes of the data:

function getBytesFromHexString($hexdata)
{
  for($count = 0; $count < strlen($hexdata); $count+=2)
    $bytes[] = chr(hexdec(substr($hexdata, $count, 2)));

  return implode($bytes);
}

function getImageMimeType($imagedata)
{
  $imagemimetypes = array( 
    "jpeg" => "FFD8", 
    "png" => "89504E470D0A1A0A", 
    "gif" => "474946",
    "bmp" => "424D", 
    "tiff" => "4949",
    "tiff" => "4D4D"
  );

  foreach ($imagemimetypes as $mime => $hexbytes)
  {
    $bytes = getBytesFromHexString($hexbytes);
    if (substr($imagedata, 0, strlen($bytes)) == $bytes)
      return $mime;
  }

  return NULL;
}

$encoded_string = "....";
$imgdata = base64_decode($encoded_string);
$mimetype = getImageMimeType($imgdata);