Saving a text file on server using JavaScript

ajax, javascript, jquery, text

Solution

You must have a server-side script to handle your request, it can't be done using javascript.

To send raw data without URIencoding or escaping special characters to the php and save it as new `txt` file you can send ajax request using `post` method and `FormData` like:

JS:

var data = new FormData();
data.append("data" , "the_text_you_want_to_save");
var xhr = (window.XMLHttpRequest) ? new XMLHttpRequest() : new activeXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
xhr.open( 'post', '/path/to/php', true );
xhr.send(data);

PHP:

if(!empty($_POST['data'])){
$data = $_POST['data'];
$fname = mktime() . ".txt";//generates random name

$file = fopen("upload/" .$fname, 'w');//creates new file
fwrite($file, $data);
fclose($file);
}

Edit:

As Florian mentioned below, the XHR fallback is not required since `FormData` is not supported in older browsers (formdata browser compatibiltiy), so you can declare XHR variable as:

var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();

Also please note that this works only for browsers that support `FormData` such as IE +10.

Problem

Is it possible to save text to a new text file using JavaScript/jQuery without using PHP? The text I'm trying to save may contain HTML entities, JS, HTML, CSS and PHP scripts that I don't want to escape or use urlencode! If it's only can be achieved using PHP how can I pass the text to PHP without encoding it?

Original source