Printer Friendly Pages

[Anon]

Hello all. I am new to the group and what has brought me here is the need to convert existing web pages to a printer friendly format. I know very little about PHP other than some rudimentary basics.

What I need is to take an existing page (an article) on my website and strip out the images, header, footer and menu bars leaving only the text. The printer friendly version will require a new header and footer both of which are text only.

I have been doing this by hand but it is beginning to get a little much.

Any direction would be certainly appreciated. I know there are some Non PHP scripts for this but I would like to keep everything in PHP since the back-end is PHP driven.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Bob

[yelvington]

You could put a unique tag at the beginning and the end of the content and harvest it with a fairly simple regular expression.

But in the long run, the right way to do it is to turn your entire approach upside down.

Store all of your content in its purest form -- without the headers, footers, menu bars, ads, decorative elements, etc.

Then use PHP -- or, for that matter, server-side includes -- to pull in the standard headers/footers/etc.

This makes it easy to serve up alternative representations of your site (for printers, for Palm Pilots, et cetera). Perhaps even more importantly, you can redesign your site without winding up in a rest home for nervous disorders.

You don't have to know a lot of PHP to do this, or for that matter a lot about programming in general. And, as I mentioned, you actually can accomplish it using server-side includes (shtml) instead of PHP.

The advantage of PHP for a simple task such as this is that PHP's support for conditional behaviors is much more flexible and much easier to implement than server-side includes can provide.

[Anon]

Thanks for your reply. I makes sense what you are saying. I only wish I had taken that approach when I originally designed the site.

Unfortunately, I have made an number of "errors" that are causing me some problems including the printer friendly pages. (I also used PHP Require instead of Include in all of the pages - 300 of them - oh well).

The harvesting idea seems feasible however I don't know enough about it. I honestly have no idea what you mean by a regular expression. I will look around to see what I can learn about it.

I appreciate you taking the time to answer my question in such detail.

Bob

[yelvington]

You already know a little about regular expressions; you just don't call them that. If you have ever done anything like this in DOS:

DIR *.txt

... you are heading down that road. You have used an expression that matches anything ending in ".txt" rather than typing in a lot of filenames manually.

The regular-expression functions in PHP let you do much more powerful things, such as the equivalent of "Find everything between BEGIN and END" or "Find every string beginning with F followed by four digits and replace it with A followed by those digits."

The notational system for doing this is dense and entire books have been written about it, but you can get started by reading Henry Spencer's notes on regular expressions on any Unix system ... type "man regex" at a prompt.