Force file download

ruttiger

hi, i've been struggling with this for some time, and finally came up with a hack that seems to work. IE5.5 is acting up - it doesn't like

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=blah.txt

it seems to like:

Content-Disposition: filename=blah.txt

I believe the first is the correct format. Anyway, I couldn't come up with a combination of headers to force a download for NS & IE, so i used my browscap file, and get_browser() - I guess I coulda used javascript to pass a param to tell me what browser it is...anyway, here's what i got:

force download:

header("Content-Type: application/ms-x-download");
header("Content-Length: $message->bytes");

use browsecap to get info about this browser - IE 5.x is acting up

$browser = get_browser();
if(preg_match("/^IE 5./", $browser->parent)){

stupid IE hack:

header("Content-Disposition: filename=$fileName");
}else{

correct format:

header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$fileName");
}
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");

hope this helps someone out there - please gimme feedback if it does, or if you see a problem or better way to do this.

thanks!

blake

sridhar

I've never used getbrowser since I never had to plus I'm too lazy to hunt for a browser.ini file.

But usually I use the HTTP_USER_AGENT variable to find the browser.

if(preg_match("/Microsoft Internet Explorer/", $HTTP_USER_AGENT)) {
//it's IE
}
else {
//netscape or other browser
}

First print out the HTTP_USER_AGENT var to see if it IS Microsoft Internet Explorer and not something like MSIE. Also, if you use it inside a function, make it global:

global $HTTP_USER_AGENT;

hope this also works.
-sridhar

Anon

IT works as you say. I have been annoyed with IE's behaviour in this area and you advice has helped me out.

thanks,

Adam

Anon

I'm having very much trouble with Ie 6.0 doing something wrong on the downloads. It says: cannot download ... not able to open this internet site

I've tried everything people are saying, but IE 6.0 doesn't seem to work when the other browsers do. Is there something wrong or a hack for IE 6?

Anon

Apparently MS IE6 has a heartache with the

header( 'Cache-Control: no-cache' );

It is this header that apparently throws up this error in IE6. Take it out, and everything works fine. I have included in my script the following:

header( 'Cache-Control: must-revalidate' );

IE 6 does NOT have a problem with this.

Hope this helps!