Send Info from forms directly to printer

micaencephalon

I am trying to get data that is input from a form to print out on a printer attached/networked with a SUSE 9.0 Professional Linux server running MySQL and PHP 4.3.2.

What I would need is to have someone fill out a form on my webpage and when they submit the data it will send the info to my db and also print out the contents on a printer preferably a networked IP printer. I would like to use PHP functions for this if possible.

Submitting the data to a MySQL db is not a problem, I just need to know how to automatically send the data to a printer. I have read other posts about converting the data to a .PDF and that sounds great for formating the output but how do I get it to initiate the data dump from PHP or is it even possible?

Any thoughts or links I could follow?

stfuji

I think you will have to use a shell command to pipe the created pdf file into your printer

you might check out:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.exec.php

I can't remeber the linux syntax, but it was something like:

cat myFile | lpr

so you might get away with


<?php
$myfile = "/tmp/myfile.txt"

system('cat ' . escapeshellarg($myfile) . ' | lpr');

?>

This is untested as I am not currently running linux (yet) and if I wanted to print with windows there is a printer library

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.printer.php

-Geoffrey

yelvington

http://www.php.net/popen

Open a pipe to lpr, fwrite data, fclose.

Obviously you must have printer support installed on your Linux box. I don't use SUSE but I would expect it to come with CUPS.

stfuji

yelvington,

I like your response, much nicer way...

Do you mind posting a tenative sample assuming standard printer support on a linux box of what the command sequence would look like.

I read the page you specified and am intrigued, but I can't get my head around how this would actually be coded.

Thanks ahead,

Geoffrey

yelvington

You just use popen() where ordinarily you would use fopen(). The result is a handle that you can read or write to, depending on the mode.

$content = 'hello, world';
$cmd = 'lpr';
if (!$fp = popen($cmd, 'w'))
die('Can't open pipe to printer');
fwrite($fp,$content);
fclose($fp);

If you need to add arguments to the command -- such as the name of the printer, etc -- just change $cmd accordingly.

lpr will read the input from stdin and write it to the printer queue; other parts of the CUPS suite will handle everything else.

Make sure your CUPS setup is working correctly first. From a shell, try:

echo 'hello, world' | lpr

micaencephalon

Thanks to everyone who responded to this question. I am using cron to print the contents of a directory (ie lpr .../*.pdf) and this works for every minute. I installed the printer using cups and wrote the file to a directory instead of displaying it on the screen.

I would really like to get this working every second but cron only goes as low as per minute. I will have to look at cron calling a script that loops every second for 59 seconds to get the result I am looking for. This is probably out of the context for this discussion thread but if anyone has any ideas on this sort of script that would be great too! I know it wouldn't be in PHP but if someone else has run across this and could point me in the right direction that would be great.

Again thanks for everyone's help!

aye_myat

can the $content variable contain html tag as i want to print everytihng display on the current window and im using linux platform...

thanks.