Create and download a text file using php

Question

Here's what I'm trying to do. I have a series of reports that they also want to be able to download as comma delimited text files. I've read over a bunch of pages where people say simply echo out the results rather than creating a file, but when I try that it just outputs to the page they are on. I have this in the form of each report ``` Export File<input type="checkbox" name="export" value="1" /> ``` So on the post I can check if they are trying to export the file. If they are I was trying to do this: ``` if($_POST['export'] == '1') { $filename = date("Instructors by DOB - ".$month) . '.txt'; $content = ""; # Titlte of the CSV $content = "Name,Address,City,State,Zip,DOB
"; for($i=0;$i<count($instructors);$i++) $content .= ""; //fill content fwrite($filename, $content); header("Cache-Control: public"); header("Content-Description: File Transfer"); header("Content-Length: ". filesize("$filename").";"); header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$filename"); header("Content-Typ…

Accepted Answer

I overlooked the way you are writing out the contents before asking you to try closing the file.

Check the fwrite manual here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.fwrite.php

What you need to do is:

```
$filename = "yourfile.txt";
#...
$f = fopen($filename, 'w');
fwrite($f, $content);
fclose($f);
```

and after closing the file, you can now safely send it across for download.

```
header("Cache-Control: public");
header("Content-Description: File Transfer");
header("Content-Length: ". filesize("$filename").";");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$filename");
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream; "); 
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");

readfile($filename);
```

There are a couple of things:

- You really dont need to set the content-type as `application/octet-stream`. Why not set a more real type as `text/plain`?

- I really dont understand how you want to use the date functionality. please refer to the manual here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

- As correctly pointed out by @nickb, you must exit the script after doing the `readfile(..)`

Create and download a text file using php

Solution

Problem