PHP and ASCII

[Anon]

Hi,
is there any possibility to use ascii code in PHP. I have a label printer which understands ascii only. How can i send this to the printer.

One possibility is to make a batchfile, i tried and the printer prints, but how can i execute this file from PHP. The PHP is installed on a Unix server as well as the printer.
Please help me and try to be clear bacause i'm a beginner.Thanks a lot

[Anon]

have you got the cgi php binary on your server?

you can check this by creating a "hello world" php file and then trying

php hello_world.php3

at the command line. if it works it should echo as normal, if it fails you'll get "command not found" or somesuch

if it works then you can just go

php myscript.php3 | lpr

or whatever you normally do to print. the output of php should be plain ascii anyway, as anything else is subject to dodgy browser support.

--
rad

[Anon]

If you know where your printer is mounted to the system, you can simply execute a command to write the contents of a text file directly to the printer device.

I do it like this.

1. write my text to a file
2. execute a cat command like ..
   exec(cat /var/www/html/mytext.txt > /dev/ttyS0)
   where ttyS0 is the name of your printer device.