writing to client's local drive

sherrysun

hello all:
Could anyone tell me how to create a text file in client's local drive with fopen()? My comamnd is:
$fp = fopen("c:\temp\test.txt", "w+");
I am getting an error : permission denied. I think it is trying to write to the server's c drive instead. thanks
sherry

weekender

i don't think you can write just anywhere on the client computer, in fact i'm not sure that you can write to it at all - tell us why you want to, and there may be an alternative...

sherrysun

Hello Weekender:
thank you for your reply. I am writing a page that produce a report in csv format. I really want to let user to select a location on his/her local drive. Actually only our company's managers will be able to access those reports. Any ideas on how to do what I want to do?? thanks
sherry

weekender

ok what you want to do is this...

write the report to the server
get the report to the client. there is a way of doing this, where you open the file to the browser, but instead of displaying the file, you force the browser to bring up a save dialog so the file can be saved by the client.

i took this from [man]header[/man]...

<?php
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=downloaded.csv");

//output csv file here
?>

if you save this file as getreport.php, when someone browses to getreport.php a dialog box will open asking them to save the file and suggesting a name.

nb you can only send headers at the start of an html file - i.e. before you echo <head> in the html. sending headers after the start of html will cause an error.

hope that helps!

adam

sherrysun

thank you, adam. I will trying your way.
sherry