McLabel is a command-line program which will process your McMaster-Carr receipt/invoice in HTML format, and generate a label for each item in DYMO Label v.8 XML format, suitable for printing on Large White Shipping Labels (30256) with a DYMO LabelWriter printer, using DYMO Label Software for Mac or Windows.

Motivation

When I buy parts, I like to keep them in the original bag, so that I know what the part is and how to reorder it. This works great with parts from Digi-Key, because their bags come with a label that contains all sorts of useful information, including the part number, and a description of the part. Some of this information is also reproduced in machine-readable form in a DataMatrix 2D bar code on the label.

However, when I buy parts from McMaster-Carr, each bag comes with only a single handwritten number on it, which is the number of the line item on the receipt. This is all you need for identifying parts in the context of a particular receipt. But once you separate the bag from the receipt, the number becomes meaningless.

Therefore, I wrote this program so that I can print out my own labels to affix to the bags when I receive my McMaster-Carr order. (At least for any items I intend to keep in the bag.) I have a LabelWriter 450 printer, so the output is targeted to the DYMO Label Software that comes with that printer.

Usage

Usage: mclabel [options] HTMLFILE ...

    -d  --dest-dir=DIR        Set directory for output files
                           (Default: '~/Documents/DYMO Label Software/Labels')
    -p  --prefix=STRING       Set prefix for output file names (Default: 'Mc')

    -v  --version             Print version and exit
    -h  --help                Print this message and exit

On the McMaster-Carr website, click on the Activity link at the top of the screen. Click on one of your purchase order numbers (such as "0104PPELLETI" in my case). Now the website should be displaying your receipt (or invoice, or whatever, not sure what to call it). Now choose "Save Page As..." from the File menu. Select the format to be "Web Page, complete" and give it a name (I prefer to name it after the purchase order number, but that is not required) and hit "Save". If you have multiple purchase orders, you can repeat for each one.

Now go to the command line and run mclabel on the HTML file you just saved. For example,

mclabel ~/orders/McMaster-Carr/0104ppelleti.html

You can specify more than one HTML file on the command line if you want to process multiple purchase orders.

McLabel will create one file for each item in your purchase order. They will be named something like Mc0104PPELLETI-007.label, where 0104PPELLETI is the purchase order number, and 007 is the item's line number on the receipt.

By default, McLabel will put its output files in either ~/Documents/DYMO Label Software/Labels or ~/Documents/DYMO Label/Labels, if one of those directories exists. However, you can change the output directory by specifying the -d or --dest-dir option on the command line.

You can change the default Mc prefix for output file names with the -p or --prefix option.

Once you have run McLabel, you can open the "DYMO Label" application and choose "Open..." from the File menu. Then pick one of the label files created by McLabel. Then you can print it. (Unfortunately, you need to do this for each label; I don't know of a way to print them all at once.) The label files are formatted to be printed on Large White Shipping Labels (30256).

Installation

From binaries

Binaries for Mac OS X and Windows are available under the releases tab on GitHub. (Linux binaries are not provided, because the DYMO Label Software does not support Linux, so there would be no way to print the labels you create.)

Just copy the appropriate binary into a directory on your PATH.

From source

McLabel is written in Haskell. If you're familiar with Haskell, you already know how to build McLabel. McLabel can be built with either Cabal or Stack.

If you're not familiar with Haskell, here's the quick-start:

• Clone this repo (or download a source distribution from releases)
• Install Stack
• In the top directory of this repo, run stack --install-ghc install
• Wait a really long time (it only takes this long the first time)

This will copy mclabel to the directory ~/.local/bin. (Or on Windows, %APPDATA%/local/bin.) You can either put that directory on your PATH, or copy the binary to wherever you want to have it.