Question

I’m trying to return a CSV from an action in my webapp, and give the user a prompt to download the file or open it from a spreadsheet app. I can get the CSV to spit out onto the screen, but how do I change the type of the file so that the browser recognizes that this isn’t supposed to be displayed as HTML? Can I use the csv module for this?

import csv  def results_csv(self):      data = ['895', '898', '897']      return data 

Answer 1

To tell the browser the type of content you’re giving it, you need to set the Content-type header to ‘text/csv’. In your Pylons function, the following should do the job:

response.headers['Content-type'] = 'text/csv'