Reference

Console Adapters

laminas-console's console abstraction layer works around various bugs and limitations in operating systems, including:

• display of colorized text.
• discovery and calculation of console window size.
• discovery of console charset.
• basic line drawing capabilities.

Console adapters implement Laminas\Console\Adapter\AdapterInterface, and you should typehint against that interface for purposes of working with console capabilities. Adapters are included for:

• Posix (*nix-based systems)
• Windows (and Windows ANSI; for use with command.bat)
• Virtual (which provides Windows PowerShell compatibility)

Retrieving the console adapter

While you may know your current environment, you will want to write your code in such a way that the console adapter is specific to whatever environment it is run within. As such, you likely should never instantiate an adapter directly. laminas-console, and the laminas-mvc integration, provide tools for retrieving an appropriate adapter for the current environment in a generic way.

Standalone

laminas-console provides a factory for creating and returning the console adapter specific to your environment:

use Laminas\Console\Console;
use Laminas\Console\Exception\ExceptionInterface as ConsoleException;

try {
    $console = Console::getInstance();
} catch (ConsoleException $e) {
    // Could not get console adapter; most likely we are not running inside a
    // console window.
}

This returns a Laminas\Console\Adapter\AdapterInterface implementation suitable for your current environment.

Exceptions

For practical and security reasons, Console::getInstance() will always throw an exception if you attempt to get console instance in a non-console environment (i.e. when running on a HTTP server). You can override this behavior by manually instantiating one of the Laminas\Console\Adapter\* classes; you should do this only as a last resort, however!

laminas-mvc

If you are using MVC controllers you can obtain Console adapter instance using the ServiceManager.

namespace Application;

use Laminas\Mvc\Controller\AbstractActionController;
use Laminas\Console\Adapter\AdapterInterface as Console;
use Laminas\Console\Exception\RuntimeException;

class ConsoleController extends AbstractActionController
{
    public function testAction()
    {
        $console = $this->getServiceLocator()->get('console');
        if (! $console instanceof Console) {
            throw new RuntimeException('Cannot obtain console adapter. Are we running in a
console?');
        }
    }
}

If you extend AbstractConsoleController, you can use the getConsole() method instead:

namespace Application;

use Laminas\Mvc\Controller\AbstractConsoleController;
use Laminas\Console\Exception\RuntimeException;

class ConsoleController extends AbstractConsoleController
{
    public function testAction()
    {
        $console = $this->getConsole();
    }
}

Use dependency injection

We recommend using dependency injection. Instead of pulling the console adapter from the service manager, inject it from within your controller's factory. This is essentially what happens when extending AbstractConsoleController already.

Using the console adapter

Laminas\Console\Adapter\AdapterInterface describes a rich set of capabilities. Below is a sampling.

Window size and title

Multibyte sequences

For UTF-8 enabled consoles, dimensions represent the number of multibyte characters (real characters).

Virtual buffer sizes

On consoles with virtual buffers (e.g. MS Windows Command Prompt), width and height represent visible (real) size, without scrolling the window. For example, if the window scrolling width is 120 chars, but its real, visible width is 80 chars, getWidth() will return 80.

Character set

Writing to the console

Reading from the console

Miscellaneous