Php file from url download user

Lambda notation and String interpolation has been used:. I'm looking to add a 'Download this File' function below every video on one of my sites. I need to force the user to download the file, instead of just linking to it, since that begins playing a file in the browser sometimes. The problem is, the video files are stored on a separate server. The key is the header. Further you can save it to your hard drive. However, zip and exe files are downloaded automatically to the hard drive by default.

You can force images or other kind of files to download directly to the user's hard drive using the PHP readfile function. Here we're going to create a simple image gallery that allows users to download the image files from the browser with a single mouse click. If you see the above example code carefully, you'll find the download link pints to a "download.

Also, we've used PHP urlencode function to encode the image file names so that it can be safely passed as URL parameter, because file names may contain URL unsafe characters. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. I am looking to allow site users to easily download files audio that we have on a remote hosting service.

We have URLs that point to these files. The files are not held on the same site or server as the main site. Currently we have links that point to these files, and some text that instructs the site user that they have to right click and select "save file as" in order to get these files downloaded to their local machine.

To make this a bit more user friendly, it would be much better if a site user could just simply click a link and have a script that would download the file.

Having researched this, there are many online examples and SO questions about downloading files on the same server, or downloading URLs to your server.

This is not what we want to do here. We dont want to copy any of these files from the remote hosting service to the main web server.

This is for a site user to click a link and have the remote URL download the file directly to the users local machine, not the server. You could then call it from your script like: download. You may want to build a "proxy page". Your server download the file, and meanwhile it send the data to your end user. The simplest way to do so is to output the file in chunks :. Chunked Content-Transfer-Encoding allows the client to begin transmitting the file before the Content-Length field is known.

With this the user doesn't need to wait the server to download entirely the file before starting himself the download. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow.