Emulating downloading a file

[filburt1]

I want my script to act like a flat file. That is, let's say you click a link for download.php. The browser then asks to download a file...say text.txt. The file is dynamically generated by the script.

I know that you can use the content-type header (probably with a text/plain mime type) to make the browser download the file. What I can't figure out is how to make the browser see the download as a different filename.

What would I do?

header('Content-type: text/plain');

[i]what code to output the file contents?
what code to emulate the filename as text.txt?[/i]

Thanks for any help. 🙂

[jeroom]

header("Content-Type: text/plain");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=file.txt"); 
header("Pragma: no-cache"); 
header("Expires: 0"); 

where the file.txt is your file

[filburt1]

Thanks 🙂

Now do I just echo stuff which is the contents of the file, or would that break the headers?

[jeroom]

the headers will only be broken when you put an character before them
so if you accidently have

<?
header("location: tralala");
?>

Here you can see some space left, before the <?
that is direct output to the browser, and the headers came later... so that would give an error

[filburt1]

Great, it's working now 🙂