How do you send output to the user instead of the browser?

[Vigilante]

What I mean is, instead of printing output on the screen how do I give the user the option to save it on their harddrive?

[kragoth]

Try save your data into file and then make redirect to this file.
Browser must propose save this file on your harddrive.

[Vigilante]

I see. So creating a file is unavoidable?

What if I just want to dump an sql query and send it to the user the way phpmyadmin does?

[Weedpacket]

I'm sure if you searched this forum on the subject of "downloading files" (there's a button for this at the top of the page) you'll find a wealth of suggestions revolving around sending the right headers to the client and then sending the file data.

[bretticus]

I dunno about the rest of you but I'm curious...what are you trying to "save" to people's harddrives? I mean, if it's the content of the page, it's kinda already saved as it's cached. Since typical users like to be prompted to save data (so they can find it later), doesn't a file download make sense here? I mean, why would you want to avoid that? By the way, isn't that what you'd be doing if you had a download option like phpMyAdmin?

[Weedpacket]

The bit I don't get about kragoth's suggestion is the first sentence; it seems a bit excessive to write a file on the server's drive and send a URL to it - when you could just send the file data itself with the appropriate headers as per the second sentence there. For one thing, you don't know how long it will be before it's safe to delete (I came across one site with a section that works like that - NASA, as it happens).

I've got a copy of the PHPMyAdmin source handy, but for some reason I'm not inclined to burrow through to see how it does the trick.