Question

how can I programm a button so that when clicked should open the save as dialogue box?

Put simply, how can I save a file on the local machine using javascript or php? I really don’t know how to go about it.

Thanks in Advance.

EDIT:

Thanks for the quick response. I have a table that I have displayed on a web page, and a button, so that when that button is clicked, the user can specify the file path, and save that table as a .txt file to the specified destination.

Answer 1

In PHP, you can set the Content-Disposition header to Attachment, which will tell the browser that the content being served is an attached file, which is to be downloaded:

<?php
header('Content-type: application/pdf');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="downloaded.pdf"');
readfile('original.pdf');
?>

EDIT

To better fill the requirements of your updated question, you want to create a PHP-file that serves the table in the format you want it to be downloaded.

<?php
    header('Content-type: text/plain');
    header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="downloaded.txt"');

    echo " entire table here ";
?>

And then have your save button point to that pdf file

onclick="location.href='downloadTable.php?tableID=5';"