Force Download on MAC

Anon

I really,really need someones help !!

I am writing an app that must force download Jpeg files on both PC and Mac versions of i.e.

The PC version works fine but the the Mac version either prompts but then doesn't have the filename, launches the download manager but with the wrong filename or displays the image. (depending on different headers I use).

$fname=$filename.".jpg";

$fp = fopen($fname, "r");
header("Content-type:application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$fname");

fpassthru($fp);

How can I force the name on the mac !!

I can get this to work for PDF files etc but not images, why?

Please help.

Leigh

Anon

I'm a PHP newbie, so I can't give you specifics, but I have done this same trick with ColdFusion (switching the header content-type and forcing a download). Forgive me if I say anything obvious.

In my experience there are two gotchas for getting this to work reliably, for any file, on any platform:

1) The content-type is important. The more specific you can be, the better. In your case you are sending images, but the content-type you are using is octet-stream. You could try one of the image content-types instead. I don't have them in front of me, but there are cheat sheets for all content types available out there.

2) Some browser/platform mixes like to see a file name in the URL. Specifically, as the last item in the URL. I forget which particular combination of browser and platform requires this, but I usually make it a habbit to add a dummy &filename=some_file.ext at the end of URL I am using to serve up the file I am generating.

HTH

--Hardy

Anon

I'm a little late to the discussion, but I'll add my two cents for posterities sake.

Here's what I would do.

1) Use Apache's mod_rewrite to rewrite all image downloads from a specified directory to a php file.

For example, the following htaccess file will send all requests for xxx.jpg to getimage.php3?image=xxx:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ([0123456789]+).jpg$ getimage.php3?image=$1

2) Create the file getimage.php3... it should send a header containing the content-type (image/jpeg) and then pass the file thru.

I hope this helps someone later (I'm mainly writing this because an hour ago I had the same question)

Vince

mediamind

It seems to woàrk on mac netscape, but not mac IE systems.

Anon

Somebody please help. This a really good question. Can anyone get a forced-download working for IE on a MAC? PLEASE HELP ME!

Anon

Funny how much a pain in the butt this seemingly simple idea is. IE doesn't play nice with EITHER platform when it comes to forcing file downloads. I've been able to get the Mac to save files with the correct name intact.

Somewhere I remember reading that IE has a problem with reading the "Content-Disposition" header and that you can "fool" it into doing what you want by fiddling with this header.

Previous posts suggest eliminating the "attachment;" part of the header, but this doesn't save the file correectly on Mac. I found that it you enter garbage inplace of "attachment;" in the header line like this:

Header( "Content-Disposition: junk; filename=\"$filename\");

It will not understand what "junk" is and save it to the hd with the right name (though you won't think so cuz the save dialog displays the calling script page name instead - but it shows up saved under the right name.)