Question

Let’s say I have this file on my server:

server/myFile.txt

How can I make the user download it with a button click?
Am I missing a simple solution?

I am using jQuery & PHP if there is a solution for that.

thanks,
Alon

Answer 1

If you want to force a “save-as” dialog box to open for a file type that your web server is configured to output as a readable document (and you don’t want to change that configuration), you need to create a file that modifies the headers so that the browser creates such a dialog.

See the very first example in the php documentation for readfile.

You would then create a PHP file that could be accessed through a normal a href link, which would send the appropriate headers and output myFile.txt.