How to pop up a download screen?

[rolwong]

I am writing a download page for user to download his own mail attachment. For eg. user is clicking a link:
http://www.myweb.com/getfile.php?fileID=2

php will get the fileID and retrieve the path where the file was put in the server. Let's say, the path+file name is:
$file = "../storage/vo0002e.mp3";

I have wrote this script:
header("Location: $file");

error comes out. How can i correct it?

And also I test with header("Location: ../storage/vo0002e.mp3")
it will open media player instead of opening loading screen for choosing save / open. How do I make this work?

Thanks a lot

[Weedpacket]

Without seeing any code all I can guess is
1) You're trying to send HTML output mixed in with the mp3 file.
2) You're not sending a Content-Type: header of audio/mpeg to tell the client that you're sending it an mp3 file.

[dave420]

You need to send a "content-disposition" header to set a filename for the song. That means the browser will pop up the "save/open" dialogue. They did this to stop people masquerading files under other extensions. Handy 🙂

And as weedpacket said, a content-type: audio/mpeg wouldn't hurt either.