[RESOLVED] Downloading pdf

dcwm

I use a script to download a .pdf file :

The following is from Application #1 DnLdPageB.php and works very well, no problems.

<?php
header("Content-Type: application/pdf");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=.\Dox\WeightForMen2015.pdf");
readfile(".\Dox\WeightForMen2015.pdf");
?>

The following is from Application #2 DnLdPageB.php does not work and gives an error "invalid value for registry"

<?php
header("Content-Type: application/pdf");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=.\Dox\Teachingandlearning.pdf");
readfile(".\Dox\Teachingandlearning.pdf");
?>

In both cases the folder \Dox is in the same location with respect to the rest of the code. For example at my external server, index.php is in \httpdocs and so is \Dox.

I cannot find what I've done wrong. I am looking for some spelling mistake or something like this, but I cannot find anything.

Can anyone suggest how to debug this mistake, please ?

dcwm

AFTER further digging, I found that this problem only arises on Firefox. Chrome and Opera work OK. But I still have to get it working on Firefox. Any ideas ?

laserlight

Perhaps you could try:

<?php
header("Content-Type: application/pdf");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=Teachingandlearning.pdf");
readfile(".\Dox\Teachingandlearning.pdf");

The leaving out of the ".\Dox\" might make no difference, but RFC2616 states that "The receiving user agent SHOULD NOT respect any directory path information present in the filename-parm parameter, which is the only parameter believed to apply to HTTP implementations at this time." so you might as well leave it out. Leaving out the closing "?>" avoids the possibility that some stray character might follow that could somehow interfere with the PDF output.

dcwm

Thanks for this. Your script worked fine in Chrome and Opera but, like mine, not in Firefox.

laserlight

Suppose you uploaded Teachingandlearning.pdf directly, without going through PHP. Are you able to open that file via Firefox?

dcwm

I wasn't quite sure what you meant. Upload directly where to ?

Did you mean "place the file in httpdocs" and then call up the web site ? I tried this but it just said Access Forbidden.

dcwm

FURTHER :

I looked at this more : it seems that all the scripts will place the file in \Downloads, but in all cases you see a liitle window coming up which gives you the choice of saving (to \Downloads) or opening the file on the screen. It is the opening option that is going wrong. It doesn't work in Firefox.

laserlight

dcwm wrote:
Did you mean "place the file in httpdocs" and then call up the web site ? I tried this but it just said Access Forbidden.

Yes, the idea being that this will allow you to check with Firefox, bypassing your PHP script. Unfortunately, it seems like the server is configured to block the serving of files with a ".pdf" file extension, yet it allows the serving of files with a content-type of "application/pdf".

dcwm wrote:
I looked at this more : it seems that all the scripts will place the file in \Downloads, but in all cases you see a liitle window coming up which gives you the choice of saving (to \Downloads) or opening the file on the screen. It is the opening option that is going wrong. It doesn't work in Firefox.

So, with Firefox it just saves to the PDF document to \Downloads without asking if you would prefer to view it directly on the browser? If so, then perhaps your "problem" is merely a matter of browser configuration, i.e., you should have set Firefox to allow you to choose the download location.

dcwm

OK. I don't think we can do any better with this. Thank you for your help.

cretaceous

Firefox can mess up the mime type on PDFs so it doesn't recognise them properly. It's a bug that Mozilla seem to be ignoring - it's some sort of corruption issue I believe .. but it happens more than it should