Html force download file

This doesn't work if I try to do this inside of markdown on GitHub. The link just opens the text directly as a webpage as if the download was not there. Winnipass Winnipass 9 9 silver badges 19 19 bronze badges. You can do it with PHP or with. PurkkaKoodari PurkkaKoodari 6, 5 5 gold badges 34 34 silver badges 54 54 bronze badges. David David 4, 6 6 gold badges 34 34 silver badges 59 59 bronze badges. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google.

Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. The Overflow Blog. Podcast Helping communities build their own LTE networks. If for whatever reason, you cannot add the download attribute in the case that you cannot directly edit the HTML of your web page , you can optionally compress the file using zip, and instruct the user to download the zip file. You can alternatively explain to the user that they should right click on the link and select download.

If you have no other alternatives to force the file to download, you can host it on a file hosting service such as Google Docs. The most common file types that are affected by this behavior are PDF files and images.

The code below will tell the browser to prompt the user to save the file. Skip to content. Change Language. Related Articles. Table of Contents. Improve Article. Save Article. Like Article. Example: html. This won't necessary open the save as-dialog, but will download the link straight to the preset download destination.

And of course if you are doing a site for someone else, and need them to write in manually attributes to their links is probably a bad idea, but if there is way to get the attribute into the links, this can be a light solution.

Add a response header Content-Disposition:attachment; followed by the file name. Remove the Meta Content-Disposition;Inline; which will open the document in the same window. If you have a plugin within the browser which knows how to open a PDF file it will open directly.

Like in case of images and HTML content. So the alternative approach is not to send your MIME type in the response.

In this way the browser will never know which plugin should open it. I just had a very similar issue with the added problem that I needed to create download links to files inside a ZIP file. I first tried to create a temporary file, then provided a link to the temporary file, but I found that some browsers would just display the contents a CSV Excel file rather than offering to download. Eventually I found the solution by using a servlet.

The servlet takes as input a full path name to the ZIP file, and the name of the file inside the zip that should be downloaded. The following syntax will make it happen. With large PDF files the browser hangs. In the Action drop down, select Always ask. Now I am able to download e-books!

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Learn more. Force to open "Save As Asked 11 years, 3 months ago. Active 4 months ago. Viewed k times. Improve this question. Peter Mortensen I tried your updated solution, artmania - but the same problem I've been having in Safari occurred. I get what looks like the PDF in the browser window, and only when I click on the "preview" or "download" tabs at the bottom do I get the search feature I so desperately need.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Ayush Gupta Ayush Gupta 5, 2 2 gold badges 20 20 silver badges 17 17 bronze badges. At the time of this comment, the download attribute is limited to Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

Even recent versions of IE and Safari do not support it. For future support: check caniuse. Netbeans error checking complains about it, but it seems to work fine.