Comments on: How To Force File Download With PHP

By: Jānis Elsts

Jānis Elsts — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 06:35:51 +0000

Your code looks fine to me. Maybe you could try watching the download with a HTTP debugger like Fiddler to see if there's anything wrong with it.

By: Scotty

Scotty — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 03:12:36 +0000

Am trying to use this as it is entirely. Just modified the example use code to suit my needs like so

set_time_limit(0);
$file_path=’assets/mici_blossom.pdf’;
output_file($file_path, ‘mici_blossom.pdf’, ‘application/pdf’);

Keep getting this error.
C:\DOCUME~1\Scott\LOCALS~1\Temp\+6U2ePvN.pdf.part could not be saved, because the source file could not be read.

Try again later, or contact the server administrator.

The file is there and named correctly. It is a 25mb pdf. Can anyone tell me why? Or what am I missing?
Thanks
Scott

By: twakspot

twakspot — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 18:13:37 +0000

after trying the 11th script without success, finally found this and how sweet it is! thank you so much. this is SOLID! all browsers happy.

By: hariharan

hariharan — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 17:08:35 +0000

Really Great … I have been searching nearly for a day to use ob_start with file download.. either one works but not both. At Last I found it from you to use @ob_end_clean() .. Which solved my problem….

Thanks once again….

By: Dev | Pearltrees

Dev | Pearltrees — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 18:13:44 +0000

[...] header( 'Pragma: private' ); header( "Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT" ); header( "Cache-control: private" ); How To Force File Download With PHP | W-Shadow.com [...]

By: Web tools | Pearltrees

Web tools | Pearltrees — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:40:53 +0000

[...] How To Force File Download With PHP | W-Shadow.com header( 'Pragma: private' ); [...]

By: just another addict

just another addict — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 19:43:56 +0000

Thanks very much for this. You are a genius!!!

By: swellendam accommodation

swellendam accommodation — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:37:36 +0000

swellendam accommodation…

[...]How To Force File Download With PHP | W-Shadow.com[...]…

By: WuFe

WuFe — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 17:12:23 +0000

Goosy, the cURL method to retrieve the file size doesn’t work ever.
The best function to retrieve the size of a remote file is this:

function remotefilesize( $url ){
$size = get_headers( $url, 1 );
$size = $size[ "Content-Length" ];
return $size;
}

Anyway thanks a lot for the snippet..

By: goosy

goosy — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 08:55:59 +0000

Thanks a lot !!! Just more things for force download on cross -domain
delte this line “if(!is_readable($file)) die(‘File not found or inaccessible!’);” and for the file size use curl method like above
// Create a curl connection
$chGetSize = curl_init();

// Set the url we’re requesting
curl_setopt($chGetSize, CURLOPT_URL, “http://www.example.com/file.exe”);

// Set a valid user agent
curl_setopt($chGetSize, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11″);

// Don’t output any response directly to the browser
curl_setopt($chGetSize, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

// Don’t return the header (we’ll use curl_getinfo();
curl_setopt($chGetSize, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);

// Don’t download the body content
curl_setopt($chGetSize, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);

// Run the curl functions to process the request
$chGetSizeStore = curl_exec($chGetSize);
$chGetSizeError = curl_error($chGetSize);
$chGetSizeInfo = curl_getinfo($chGetSize);

// Close the connection
curl_close($chGetSize);// Print the file size in bytes

$size=$chGetSizeInfo['download_content_length'];

thx again !