Windows Screen Shot

rolando

Hola.

I'm looking to see if there is some mechanism by which I can invoke a screen shot on Windows from a PHP script. It can be either via a PHP function call or by "shelling out" to something in Windows -- it doesn't really matter. I'm just used to Linux for all my development work and I now find myself wishing to do something that requires Windows.

If you don't know for sure, some pointers to relevant documentation would be great. Once again, my level of knowledge for Windows-specific stuff is very low.

Thanks Much!
Roy

drawmack

pass the command sequence generated by the print screen key to the keyboard buffer then read the clipboard.

superwormy

If you mean you want to take a screenshot of the remote users computer... you can't. Not with client-side PHP at least.

If you want to take a screenshot of the servers desktop, try running a shell command under windows... not sure what you'd use though. There must be some way to invoke keystrokes too I would imagine.

rolando

Originally posted by superwormy
If you mean you want to take a screenshot of the remote users computer... you can't.

If you want to take a screenshot of the servers desktop, try running a shell command under windows... not sure what you'd use though. There must be some way to invoke keystrokes too I would imagine.

No, I want a screenshot of the server desktop. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is what program can be used for that purpose.

drawmack's suggestion has been helpful. I'm looking into how to use the win32 API for this purpose. Since I've never programmed on Windows before, this could be painful. 🙂

rolando

So, I figured it out. I ended up doing this in Perl since the W32 api functions in PHP are unmaintained and buggy. But you can do this by using the keybd_event() function from user32.dll. The numerical code for a print screen is 0x2C.

Here's the source in Perl. Should be easy to translate to PHP.

use Win32::API;

$keybd_event = new Win32::API('user32', 'keybd_event', 'IIII', 'V');
if(not defined $keybd_event) {
	die "Can't import API keybd_event: $!\n";
} else {
	$keybd_event->Call(0x2C,0x45,KEYEVENTF_EXTENDEDKEY | 0,0);
        $keybd_event->Call(0x2C,0x45,KEYEVENTF_EXTENDEDKEY | KEYEVENTF_KEYUP,0);
}

This'll get a screencap of the running process' desktop. Now you just gotta extract it from the clipbaord. 😉