I’m struggling with an odd error. I have a simple web app that grabs stuff from a DB then outputs it as a downloadable csv file. It works on firefox and chrome, but IE fails to recognize it as a csv file (thinking it is a html fle) and when I click save I get the error, “Unable to download {name of file} from {name of site}. Unable to open this internet site. …”
Code:
session_start();
//some logic goes here...
//generate csv header
header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=exportevent.csv");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");
echo "Event: " . $event_title . "\n";
//print the column names
echo "Last Name, First Name, Company \n";
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
{
echo $row['atlname'] . ',' . $row['atfname'] . ',' . $row['atcompany'] . "\n";
}
I’ve played around with the content-type a whole bunch, but that had no effect.
Update: I’ve tried text/csv, application/vnd.ms-excel (and variations of this), text/plain, and some others that I now forget with no luck.
This is IE8 btw.
Update 2: The connection is over SSL.
Don’t we love IE? 🙂
Try using those headers:
header("Pragma: public");
header("Expires: 0");
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
header("Cache-Control: private",false);
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"exportevent.csv\";" );
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");
I think that the octet-stream content type forces IE to download the file.
Answer:
We recently ran into this problem ourselves. See this MSKB article
These are the headers we ended up having to use to get it to work over SSL.
header("Expires: Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT");
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT");
header("Pragma: public");
header("Expires: 0");
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
header("Cache-Control: public");
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$file_name\";");
header("Content-length: " . strlen($csv_string));
Answer:
I’ve had success with the following:
header("Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel");
header("Content-disposition: attachment; filename=File.csv");
Setting the type to application/vnd.ms-excel seemed to do the trick in my case. This is all in a file that is opened by submitting a form using
target="_blank"
Answer:
The only extra code I had to add for IE to work with SSL was: header("Pragma: public");
So my headers look like this now:
header("Pragma: public");
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=some_filename.csv");
Answer:
We have just had the same issue and after adding many headers and getting a working link I then removed them one by one and found the key one for us was
“Cache-Control: public”
so in the end we just had
header("Cache-Control: public");
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=some_filename.csv");
which worked fine.
Answer:
Try setting your content type to text/csv
instead of application/octet-stream
.
Since application/octet-stream is a generic binary mime type (and doesn’t match the ‘.csv’ extension), Internet explorer might be ignoring it and computing the mime type based on the file extension.
Answer:
The solution for me was:
header_remove();
header('Content-Type: text/csv');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=brokerlist.csv');
echo $content;
Answer:
Did you try the Content-type: text/csv ?
Answer:
Some time ago I’ve got a problem with IE6 opening pdf files, and crashing when AdobeReader 6.0 was installed and tried to open file in browser window. Than I found somewhere this header:
header('Content-Type: application/force-download');
And it solved the problem, every pdf file was downloaded and opened in Adobe instead of IE.
Answer:
This simply doesn’t make sense. I tried the accepted answer, all the other answers in here, and it didn’t work for me. I tried their permutations, and somehow I managed to make it work in IE like so:
header("Pragma: public");
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
header("Cache-Control: public");
header("Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-exce");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=coupons.csv" );
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");
header("Content-Length: " . strlen($csv));
echo $csv;
die();
One thing I did is to empty the cache every freaking time I test the code. And it still doesn’t make sense. Just in case someone might need this desperately 😉
Answer:
After using Javascript it will solve your problem.
Use this for IE,
var IEwindow = window.open();
IEwindow.document.write('sep=,\r\n' + CSV);
IEwindow.document.close();
IEwindow.document.execCommand('SaveAs', true, fileName + ".csv");
IEwindow.close();
For more information i have written tutorial on that,
see – Download JSON data in CSV format Cross Browser Support
Hope this will be helpful for you.
Answer:
If you are trying to accomplish this task (getting a CSV file to download in IE8) using Salesforce.com (in which case your front-end is Visualforce and you can’t set all of the headers, only some of them), here’s what you need:
<apex:page cache="true"
contentType="application/octet-stream#myAwesomeFileName.csv"
showHeader="false" sidebar="false" standardStylesheets="false">
<apex:outputText value="{!csvContent}" escape="false"/>
</apex:page>
The key pieces here are cache=true
, which, in conjunction with the default expires=0
attribute, achieves the following headers:
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
header("Cache-Control: public");
And then the contentType
of application/octet-stream
— doing text/csv
fails for IE8.