Question

I have a lightbox with a form, when the user sends the form a download should start, this is the code I use:

function start_download( $path, $item ) {
    $file = $path.$item;
    header("Content-type:application/pdf");
    header('"Content-Disposition:attachment;filename="'.$file.'"');
}

Unless the fact that is a function is a problem, I think it should work right? well it doesn’t. No error whatsoever.

Looking at Chrome’s developer tools I can see that the headers are actually set application/pdf.

Oh, also, when I add readfile($file) it seems to read the file but it returns a strange string (numbers and weird symbols).

I searched over this site but nothing seems to work. I really don’t know what else can I do. Ideas?

BTW if I “echo” the $file it shows the url correctly, I don’t think that is the problem.

Answer 1

Try the following:

function start_download( $path, $item ) {

    $file = $path.$item;

    if (file_exists($file)) {
        header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');
        header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=' . $item);
        header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');
        header('Expires: 0');
        header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');
        header('Pragma: public');
        header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($file));
        ob_clean();
        flush();
        if (readfile($file) !== FALSE) return TRUE;
    } else {
        die('File does not exist');
    }
}