Trigger to Download a File When Clicking Link

There are two ways to trigger to download a file.

1. HTML 5 Download Attribute.
2. Download File Using PHP Script.

The download attribute triggers a force download but it does not supported by Safari. Following are the versions that support download attribute.

Chrome = 14.0
Internet Explorer = 13.0
Firefox = 20.0
Opera = 15.0

Download File Using Using HTML 5 Download Attribute

1	<a href="SampleFile.pdf" download>Download File</a>

If you want to rename the file at the time of downloading, use the following code:

1	<a href="SampleFile.pdf" download="new_filename">Download File</a>

Download File Using PHP – Server Side Script

We will need to create PHP script file and pass the file name in the href attribute that we want to download as you can see below:

1	<a href="download.php?file=SampleFile.pdf" target="_new">Download File</a>

PHP Script

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if (isset($_GET['file'])) { $file = $_GET['file']; if (file_exists($file) && is_readable($file) && preg_match('/\.pdf$/',$file)) { header('Content-Type: application/pdf'); header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$file\""); readfile($file); } }

The above file will read the file name and trigger to force download. This example will work on all browsers.

Note: I used this example for PDF file type, you can change it as per your requirement.

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