PHP: open a file download dialog

Question

I have an MPEG file (.mpg) hosted in Amazon S3, that I want to link to a page I have, so the user will be able to download it from the page. I have in my page a link: bla bla"

The link to the file works when I right-click it and choose "Save Target As" , but I would like it to work also when I left click it, and that it will open a file download dialog. right now, a left click will direct to a page that has the video directly played in it (in FireFox) or just won't load (in Internet Explorer).

I am working in PHP, why does this happen?

Answer 1

You probably want to wrap the file within a "download" PHP script that sends the appropriate Content-Disposition header telling the browser to treat it as a download instead of a content item.

For instance:

header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=yourfilenamehere.ext>");

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/260519

Answer 2

This will work with UTF-8 filenames (say you have one in a variable called $orfilename):

function detectUserAgent() {
    if (!array_key_exists('HTTP_USER_AGENT', $_SERVER))
        return "Other";

    $uas = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
    if (preg_match("@Opera/@", $uas))
        return "Opera";
    if (preg_match("@Firefox/@", $uas))
        return "Firefox";
    if (preg_match("@Chrome/@", $uas))
        return "Chrome";
    if (preg_match("@MSIE ([0-9.]+);@", $uas, $matches)) {
        if (((float)$matches[1]) >= 7.0)
            return "IE";
    }

    return "Other";
}

/*
 * We have 3 options:
 * - For FF and Opera, which support RFC 2231, use that format.
 * - For IE and Chrome, use attwithfnrawpctenclong
 *   (http://greenbytes.de/tech/tc2231/#attwithfnrawpctenclong)
 * - For the others, convert to ISO-8859-1, if possible
 */
$formatRFC2231 = 'Content-Disposition: attachment; filename*=UTF-8\'\'%s';
$formatDef = 'Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="%s"';

switch (detectUserAgent()) {
    case "Opera":
    case "Firefox":
        $orfilename = rawurlencode($orfilename);
        $format = $formatRFC2231;
        break;

    case "IE":
    case "Chrome":
        $orfilename = rawurlencode($orfilename);
        $format = $formatDef;
        break;
    default:
        if (function_exists('iconv'))
            $orfilename =
                @iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $orfilename);
        $format = $formatDef;
}

header(sprintf($format, $orfilename));

Answer 3

Use this:

download.php?movie=moviename.mpg
header('Content-disposition: attachment; filename='.$_GET['moviename.mpg']);
exit();

This will force the download box for whatever movie you have.