How to use PHP functions to generate PDF reports

PDF report is one of the main tools for businesses and individuals in data collection and simple data query. PHP is a popular scripting language that can be used to generate highly customized reports by converting HTML code to PDF. In this article, we will discuss how to generate PDF reports using PHP functions.

Step 1: Install and Configure PHP

As the first step, we need to make sure that PHP is installed on the server. To check if PHP is installed on the server, open a terminal window and use the following command:

php –v

This command will tell you what version of PHP is installed. If you don't have PHP installed, you will need to install and configure it.

Step 2: Install wkhtmltopdf

wkhtmltopdf is an open source tool to convert HTML pages to PDF format. First, you need to download and install wkhtmltopdf. You can download it from the following URL:

https://wkhtmltopdf.org/downloads.html

Select the corresponding version to download and configure it according to your server environment.

Step 3: Write PHP code

The next thing to do is to write PHP code. Here, we will introduce how to use PHP functions to generate PDF reports. You can use the following PHP code:

$html = "PDF Report

This is a sample PDF report.

";
$pdf_report = '/path/to /pdf/report.pdf';
$command = "/path/to/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf ".$html." ".$pdf_report;
exec($command);?>

In this example, $html is HTML code, you can write it yourself to generate PDF report. $pdf_report is the path to the PDF report, which will be generated here.

Command variables are used to set the path of the wkhtmltopdf tool and the parameters required for conversion. Executing the exec($command) command will execute the command and generate a PDF report.

Step 4: Customize PDF Report

In this example, we just wrote a simple HTML code with some important tags. However, you can use arbitrary HTML tags to customize PDF reports. For example, you can use the following PHP code to customize a PDF report:

$html = "< /head>

PDF Report

< ;/tr>

First Name	Last Name	Email
John	Doe	john.doe@example.com
Jane	Doe	jane.doe@ example.com
Bob	Smith	bob.smith@example.com

";
$pdf_report = '/path/to/pdf/report.pdf';
$command = "/path/to/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf ".$html." ".$pdf_report;
exec($command);?>

In the above example, we have Tables and some styles are used to make the PDF report more readable. You can customize the PDF report using additional HTML tags as needed.

Conclusion

In this article, we learned how to use PHP functions to generate PDF reports. Before writing the code, you need to make sure that PHP is installed and configured correctly, and that the wkhtmltopdf tool is installed. You can then use PHP code to convert the HTML code to PDF to generate highly customized reports. I hope this article can help you learn more about how to use PHP to generate PDF reports.

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