Php file download from url

This one results in downloading the file to the path in which the PHP file is located at - which is not what I want - I need the file to be downloaded to the Downloads folder. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Asked 3 years, 9 months ago. Active 3 years, 9 months ago. Viewed 8k times. So now I'm basically lost.

What's the appropriate way to download files? Improve this question. Possible duplicate of php, file download — Obsidian Age. Tried changing the Content-Transfer-Encoding value to chunked , but the result is the same. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. I successfully did it, thanks to Google and a lot of experiments. Improve this answer. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google.

Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. It was previously mentioned that zip and exe files download automatically, without using PHP script. First, create an HTML file with the following code. Here, the four anchor elements are defined to download the four types of files. Output The following dialog box will appear to download the file after clicking the zip file link.

The user can then download the file or open the file in the archive manager. If you click on the image file, the image will be opened automatically in the browser, as shown in the following output. You must save the file to make a copy of the image file in the local drive. In the same way, when you click on PDF and TEXT file links, the content of the file will be opened in the browser without downloading the file. The solution to this problem is to download the file forcibly using the built-in PHP readfile function.

The readfile function is used in PHP script to forcibly download any file of the current location, or the file with the file path. The syntax of this function is given below. This function can take three arguments. The first argument is mandatory, and the other two arguments are optional.

This function returns the number of bytes read from the file mentioned in the first argument. The uses of this function are shown in the following two examples. In this example, we will create an HTML file with the following code, where the file name will be passed as a parameter of the URL named path , and the value of this parameter will be passed to the PHP file named download.

We will create the PHP file with the following code to download the file forcibly. Next, the header function is used to set the necessary header information before using the readfile function.

The basename function is used to retrieve the filename, and the filesize function is used to read the size of the file in bytes, which will be shown in the opening dialog box to download the file. The flush function is used to clear the output buffer.