Question

My script puts together a set of htaccess rules based on information passed into it and gives the user a downloadable text file with the rules printed out inside. The idea is that an administrator fills out some form information, clicks a downloadable link, gets a text file with the rules printed out inside, opens the file, copies the rules and pastes them into the htaccess file of their domain.

I’ve managed to put together the script that produces these rules. However, the text file seems to ignore all newline characters that I print to it. The tabs work, but the newlines do not. It must have something to do with the encoding I’m using with the header() function calls, but I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. No amount of Googling as seemed to point me in the right direction. Any input would be appreciated.

Here’s the code:

header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="htaccess.txt"'); 
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');

$id = addslashes( $_GET['id']);
$location = addslashes( $_GET['location'] ); 
$location = substr($location, strpos($location, '/', 9 ) + 1 ) . ( ( substr( $location, strlen($location) - 1 ) == '/' ) ? '' : '/' );
$regEx = '([0-9a-zA-Z-_]*)';
$lines = array();

for( $x = 0; $x < 10; $x++ ) {
    $line = 'RewriteRule ^' . $location;
    for( $y = 1; $y <= $x; $y++ )
        $line .= $regEx . '/';
    $line .=  '*$' . "\t\t\t\t\t";
    $line .= "http://localhost/redirect.php?ring=$id";
    $line .= ( $x >= 1 ) ? '&link=$1' : '';
    $line .= ( $x > 1 ) ? '&tag' . ( $x - 1 ) . '=$' . $x . ' [NC]' . "\n" : "\n";
    $lines[] = $line;
}

foreach( $lines as $line )
    echo $line;

Answer 1

Are you testing on a windows system or a unix system? I seem to remember that unix systems use different line ending characters in text files than windows systems do.

Wikipedia suggests

“Another common problem is the use of
‘\n’ when communicating using an
Internet protocol that mandates the
use of ASCII CR+LF for ending lines.
Writing ‘\n’ to a text mode stream
works correctly on Windows systems,
but produces only LF on Unix, and
something completely different on more
exotic systems. Using “\r\n” in binary
mode is slightly better, as it works
on many ASCII-compatible systems, but
still fails in the general case. One
approach is to use binary mode and
specify the numeric values of the
control sequence directly,
“\x0D\x0A”.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline