Create and download a text file using php

Question

Here\'s what I\'m trying to do. I have a series of reports that they also want to be able to download as comma delimited text files. I\'ve read over a bunch of pages where

Answer 1

I overlooked the way you are writing out the contents before asking you to try closing the file.

Check the fwrite manual here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.fwrite.php

What you need to do is:

$filename = "yourfile.txt";
#...
$f = fopen($filename, 'w');
fwrite($f, $content);
fclose($f);

and after closing the file, you can now safely send it across for download.

header("Cache-Control: public");
header("Content-Description: File Transfer");
header("Content-Length: ". filesize("$filename").";");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$filename");
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream; "); 
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");

readfile($filename);

There are a couple of things:

• You really dont need to set the content-type as application/octet-stream. Why not set a more real type as text/plain?
• I really dont understand how you want to use the date functionality. please refer to the manual here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php
• As correctly pointed out by @nickb, you must exit the script after doing the readfile(..)