Tag archive for: header

PHP codes to tell browsers to open the download dialog box for users to download a file

Ideally, when we build web applications which generate files on demand, we will want our users to be able to use their browsers to save a copy of our files in their local harddisk. For instance, the tool for generating customized codes for countries in the world, which I had created earlier, will tell browsers to prompt a download dialog box after users had submitted the form.

Image of firefox dialog box after submitting request to generate custom codes from list of countries in the world.

However, this is not the default behavior of browsers. By default, browsers will show the contents of a HTTP response generated by our PHP script in the browser window. This behaviour can be seen when I point my browser to http://www.techcoil.com/robots.txt.

In this post, I will discuss how we can tell browsers to show a dialog box for users to save the contents generated by a PHP script as a file.