Force browser to start download

[Anon]

Hello,

I searched a lot about this on the net, but found
nothing :-(

I have a database that has a blob field that contains text documents.
In my application I want to add a button that
enables the user to save such a text into a file.
That means, by clicking this button, I need to send the text file to the browser, forcing a
"save as" dialog to pop up.

The text must be downloaded, not shown in the
browser!

How can I do this?

thank you,

yves

[Anon]

This code does the trick for me:

$file = "archive.zip";

header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Length: " . filesize($file));
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$file");

readfile($file);

Of course, $file is the file you are sending to the browser. I do not know if this will work for all browsers. I can confirm it works for IE6. I don't see why it wouldn't work for other browsers 🙂 Hope this helps and can get you started.

-Josh

[Anon]

hmm,

this is not working in my case, because
I do not have a file on the webservers filesystem,
but I have data in a blob that should be send to
the browser.

yves

[Anon]

Well, what you would need to do instead of using the readfile() function is read it out of the database, then print it out.

For example:

// Use something along these lines instead of readfile();
$select = mysql_query("SELECT blob FROM table WHERE ID='3'");
list($file) = mysql_fetch_row($select);
echo $file;

Hope that helps 🙂

-Josh

[Anon]

Oops, I forgot some other details... I believe this code will work for ascii text files, but it should work for binary files as well (I think):

// NOT TESTED
$select = mysql_query("SELECT file_name,file FROM table WHERE ID='3'");
list($file_name,$file) = mysql_fetch_row($select);

header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Length: " . strlen($file));
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$file_name");

echo $file;

Let me know how that turns out...

-Josh

[Anon]

Thank you!
I will have a try and tell you the result,

yves