Hi There
Im trying to enable clicking a href link to download a file automatically for some reason ( probably something silly ) my file im downloading is always 0kb in size even though i know the image / pdf / zip exist.

My code in my download_file.php is as below

$filen = isset($_GET['filen']) ? addslashes($_GET['filen']) : '';
$ext=substr($filen, -3); 
$fileDownload="download.".$ext;
header('Content-disposition: attachment; filename='.$fileDownload);
switch ($ext) {
case "pdf":
header('Content-Type: application/pdf');
break;
case "zip":
header('Content-Type: application/zip'); // ZIP file
break;
case "mpeg":
case "mpg":
header('Content-Type: audio/mpeg'); // Audio MPEG (MP3,...) file
break;
}
readfile($filen);
?>

My link to the above is

<a href="download_file.php?filen=<?= $asset[0] ?>">

and the url is normaly something like /uploads/filename.pdf

Has anyone got any idea what i am doing wrong here. I have tried taking out the switch and literally just putting in everything as basic like below

<?php
header("Content-type: application/x-file-to-save");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=test.pdf");
readfile('/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/On_a_Knife_Edge_-_Schools_Pack1.pdf');
?>

But it always uploads 0 bytes

Any help would be greatly received as im going cross eyed on this now.

Cheers

Steve

Since your URL is linking to a PDF file, I would think your script is not even being used or executed at all.

If you are certain that the file exists, then perhaps the url is wrong and simply doesn't point to where you think it does. As an example, on shared hosts absolute paths usually looks something like

/home/username/public_html/some/directory/file.ext

See what result you get from file_exists().

Hey lizciz,
good idea thanks. will try that now.

OK lizciz
Good test.

I have evaluated that the file isnt effectively being found.
However, when i output the url it's looking for and paste that into a new browser window the file does in fact exist.

Any ideas to forward me another step.???

Well, when using an absolute path (starts with /) you start from the root. The root from the browsers perspective isn't the same as from the servers perspective, where php operates. Hence, as I wrote before, absolute paths will often start with "/home/username/public_html" or similar in php scripts, which should not be included in i.e. anchor link tags.

So to clarify, a link to
/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/On_a_Knife_Edge_-_Schools_Pack1.pdf

should perhaps be
/home/username/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/On_a_Knife_Edge_-_Schools_Pack1.pdf

when passing it to php functions.

To find your absolute path, you can i.e. echo the response from getcwd().

Thank lizciz
Much appreciated

Just to add you absolutely right in what you said.
My referencing by absolute url just wasn't working on the server and by using getcwd ive established how to reference the file.

Thanks soo much. much appreciated.