Why doesn't imagecreatefromwebp understand a variable?

Question

$im = imagecreatefromwebp('site.com/pic.webp');

This code works, but if you do it like this

 $pic1 = $a[0]->src; $im = imagecreatefromwebp($pic1);

Already not working. What is it so? There is a link in the $ pic1 variable.

And if there will be http://site.com/pic.webp also will not work?
Actually, I have $ im = imagecreatefromwebp ('http: //site.com/pic.webp');
@emtecif, A situation when replacing a string literal with a variable with the same value leads to the inoperability of the code, it smacks of magic.

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