Text downloadable file

Last days I needed to create a file which had to be downloaded by many users. The file had to be in plain text and contents from file come from database. Because I didn’t had a separate folder for each user I couldn’t write the information to a file to the server and put a link in order the user to download it. I thought a little bit how to handle it and found a very simple solution to to make a file downloadable to users. I even try to other popular formats like .doc, .xls,.csv,.dat and it works really nice. Extension that I tested it and didn’t worked are .xlsx and .pdf.

In order to make a file downloadable you should modify the header of the page to make Content-type: application/octet-stream and Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\”downloadableFile.extension\” in order to inform the browser that there is an attachment binary file. The file will open in a window to inform the user it to open it with a default application or save it to disk.
Code for downloadable file:

<?
		header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
		header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"downloadablefile.txt\"");
		echo 'Contents of plain text downloadable file';  
?>

CSV downloadable file

The real magic comes when you wanna make csv file downloadable. You can read data from a mysql table and write the contents to a csv file. You should only read contents from a table and using echo output to the file.

<?
		header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
		header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"downloadablefile.csv\"");
		$connect = mysql_connect($server, $user, $password)
			or die ("Database CONNECT Error"); 
 		$resultcsv = mysql_db_query($database, "select * from $csvTable");
		while ($query = mysql_fetch_array($resultcsv)) 
		{ 
			echo $query["Name"].",".$query["City"]."\n";
		}
		mysql_close($connect);
?>

Excel downloadable file

Code for generating a excel downloadble file:

<?
		header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
		header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"downloadableFile.xls\"");
		$connect = mysql_connect($server, $user, $password)
			or die ("Database CONNECT Error"); 
 		$resultxls = mysql_db_query($database, "select * from $xlsTable");
		while ($query = mysql_fetch_array($resultxls)) 
		{ 
			echo $query["Name"]."\t".$query["City"]."\n";
		}
		mysql_close($connect);
?>

You can look through records from database and output as I did for csv

Doc downloadable file

You can even make a downloadable .doc files by changing the file extension to doc.

<?
		header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
		header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"downloadablefile.doc\"");
		echo 'Contents of Word Document.';  
?>

Bookmark It