Can PHP help me ?

[Anon]

I'm new to the internet / programming and wonder if learning PHP will help solve my problem. I access about 5 sites and download weather info / images on a regular basis. Each time I need to enter the url, then my request, print it, then perform the above all again. My ideal would be to write a program to access all the sites, put the requested information in a file and have this file sent directly to the printer.
If anyone out there can point me in the right direction it would be greatly appreciated.
Regards, Iain.

[ame12]

Iain, PHP can help... sort of. I think you're describing a client-side app that is usually developed in VB, VC++ or similar language. PHP is designed primarily as a web server add-in to allow quick development of dynamic web sites.

The first part of what you describe (grabbing images and saving them to disk) can be accomplished with the functions fopen/fread/fclose.

But the printing part I'm not sure how you would accomplish (I'm assuming a Win32 platform). If this truly is a client-side app and not a web app, I would recommend using something like VB for rapid development (it's pretty straightforward, too).

Dave

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