php - How to send the content of an external file to printer?

Question

I want to print (printer, not screen) the content of a file via a PHP script.

How do I do this?

Answer 1

Update

php cannot easily access hardware. This is generally not considered "possible."

See:

• SO "how to "print" to paper"
• How to print directly to printer

However, as the first link shows, this is usually done with Javascript. You can output Javascript in a way similar to the methods shown on the first link to force the browser to show the print dialog box.

Original

You can use file_get_contents to print files into a variable or to the output stream.

$filecontents = file_get_contents("myfilename.txt");
print $filecontents;

You can also include files into your PHP interpretation.