Output a PDF in PHP from a byte array

Question

I am getting a byte array from a WCF service that generated the PDF and converted it to a byte array. I need to able to get the byte array and using either PHP or Javascript

Answer 1

I had to do the same thing. For me, I was generating the PDF server-side, but wanted to send it down with a bunch of other data to the client in an AJAX response. Here's the JavaScript that I ended up with. The Blob and saveAs methods are rather new technologies, so you might want to (as I did) get the polyfills for each of them, linked to above.

// Convert the Base64 string back to text.
var byteString = atob(data.reportBase64Bytes);

// Convert that text into a byte array.
var ab = new ArrayBuffer(byteString.length);
var ia = new Uint8Array(ab);
for (var i = 0; i < byteString.length; i++) {
    ia[i] = byteString.charCodeAt(i);
}

// Blob for saving.
var blob = new Blob([ia], { type: "application/pdf" });

// Tell the browser to save as report.pdf.
saveAs(blob, "report.pdf");

// Alternatively, you could redirect to the blob to open it in the browser.
//document.location.href = window.URL.createObjectURL(blob);