[Resolved] Export Downloadable Gzip text file

aaron_karp

With the help of board members like you guys, I've successfully added a "download report as csv" feature to my site. But I've been receiving requests for a gzipped txt file version as well.

Basically I have a large amount of data that, when a user clicks a link, should bring up a little "Do you want to download this file?" dialogue box. My CSV exportation works as follows: the link is to a page that contains this code:

header('Content-Type: text/x-csv');
// IE need specific header (to show the correct name of downloading file)
// grabbed from phpMyAdmin...
if (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE')) {
	header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename="' . $reportname . '"');
	header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');
	header('Pragma: public');
} else {
	header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="' . $reportname . '"');
	header('Pragma: no-cache');
}

// Run database queries, etc., and echo out data for the file here

This works great. Can anyone tell me how to modify the headers, as well as any other code I need to gzip the file, in order to make the file a downloadable gzipped txt file?

Thanks!

aaron_karp

Seem to have figured it out, for the most part:

just need to do something like this:

$data = gzencode($data);
header('Content-Type: text/x-gzip');

The rest of the headers I left alone.

Of course, since I needed to zip the data, I had to query and store it in $data before I compressed it.

After sending headers, echo out $data.

jenni

Wow! That CSV code works great, even on a Mac!
One question though. Is there a way to specify the name that the file should be saved as? In order to run the script, the file has to be .php. Even though it saves fine if I change the name to whatever.csv, I would like it to be automatic. It may be downloaded by people who don't know any better. I don't want to just put in an htaccess file that makes all .csv files parse as php...

Either way, thanks for posting the example.

aaron_karp

Of course. See this line?

header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename="' . $reportname . '"');

$reportname is the variable I'm using to hold my filename. For example:

$reportname = "myfile.csv";

Just be careful to get the quote marks right.

Of course, you can always hard-code it as well, but chances are you want some kind of dynamic filename. Mine looks like this:

$reportname = @str_replace(" ", "_", $row['CustomReportName']) . "_" . date("Y_m_d_H_i_s") . "." . $_GET['ft'];

where $_GET['ft'] is the filetype (csv or gz or txt or whatever). And viola, I have a unique filename for my CSV. Spits out something like:

Daily_Averages_2004_08_23_10_45_08.csv

I probably just explained that simple solution in waaaaay too much detail. But it beats doing real work =)

jenni

Yoiks! Just when I thought I had it... Unfortunately, in Safari on a mac the actual PHP code is displayed rather than parsed...SQL queries and all. Talk about a security issue. I'm going to have to do some more experimenting.

The name thing works great on an IBM, but doesn't work in IE on a Mac. At least the reports work there though. :-)

Thank you for your help. If you happen to know for sure that yours works in Safari, let me know. I may just be mixing parts of the script around or something.

Thanks again!

aaron_karp

I don't have a mac handy, so I can't check it out...all I can say is that it's really weird that your browser can see the PHP code. Since the server runs the script your browswer should never see anything that you don't explicity send it, either with echo or print or header, or something like that.

If I were you I would double check my code and server settings to make sure that .php files are always handled by the php compiler before being sent to the browser. Definitely not the most secure thing to have running 🙂