Question

I’m trying to get a txt file (created on-the-fly) automatically downloaded.
The following code is not working, because the user gets redirected to a page showing the txt instead of downloading it.
What I want, instead, is that clicking on the form (top part of the code) causes the page to refresh (which happens) and then the file downloaded. If a change the file format to rtf, e.g., I can download it, but not a txt.

=================NOT WORKING CODE==================

      echo "
      <form name=\"fn\" action=\"index.php?option=com_comp\" method=\"post\">
      // more not related stuff
      <input type=\"image\" src=\"".JURI::root().
      "components/com_comp/images/download_icon.png\" .
      "\" name=\"downloadaddresses\">DOWNLOAD_RESULTS
      // more not related stuff";


      if($_POST['downloadaddresses_x']!=0) {

            $myfilename = "tmp/results.txt";
            $fh = fopen($myfilename, 'w');

            $recipients = $_POST['recipients'];
            $semicolon_separated = implode(";", $recipients);
            fwrite($fh, $semicolon_separated);
            fclose($fh);

            echo "<a href=\"".$myfilename."\" id=\"downloadlink\">
            This download should start automatically!</a>";
            echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\">
                     location.href = document.getElementById('downloadlink').getAttribute('href');
                </script>";
        }           

Answer 1

need to specify the content type in the header of your PHP file

header('Content-Type: text/plain'); 
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="your_filename_here.txt"');
echo file_get_contents('path_to_file.txt');