Joseph Scott’s Blog

83 Responses to “Making IE Accept File Downloads”

1. October 2nd, 2004 at 8:24 am Mark

   

   Gah! I ended up doing just that a couple of weeks ago. I was writing a Large File Transfer application (in CF, ASP mind you) and IE would just no co-operate with the download, every other browser worked fine.

2. October 22nd, 2004 at 5:39 pm Wayne Colby

   

   It blows me away how many issues IE has. You would think the richest corporation in the world would have made a major update in the last 3 years.

3. February 9th, 2005 at 12:58 pm Will Gibson

   

   FAO: Joseph Scott
   Sir, you are a star. It took me ages to find your solution, but it works.
   Now I can anaesthetise my cold with some whiskey and go to bed with the knowledge that I have completed my days work.

4. February 9th, 2005 at 1:08 pm Joseph Scott

   

   Will, glad I could help. What were you searching for? Perhaps I should update the entry to reflect how people are searching for a solution to this problem.

5. April 29th, 2005 at 1:06 pm kris gale

   

   just ran into this today – i’m wrapping up an ecommerce application and i have a .csv export of shipping addresses for nearly-completed orders… worked fine in firefox, and lo and behold, the client complained they couldn’t download the .csv – their browser of choice? IE. (cue sad horn-playing sounds.)

6. June 1st, 2005 at 9:02 am Adrian Hall

   

   Came across this one too. Seems to work with IE.

   http://lists.nyphp.org/pipermail/talk/2004-September/011778.html

7. July 15th, 2005 at 5:05 am scoutt

   

   you can get rid of the session_cache_limiter and just change your header to this

   header(”Content-disposition: inline; filename=filename=”report.csv”");

   notice I changed it to “inline” IE needs that.

8. July 31st, 2005 at 2:44 am Crirus

   

   Hi guys

   I use this to make IE works but no luck:
   header(”Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate”);
   header(”Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0″, false);
   header(”Cache-control: private”);
   header(”Pragma: no-cache”);
   header(’Content-type: application/octet-stream’);
   header(’Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=”links.csv”‘);
   header(”Content-Length: ” . strlen($content));
   header(”Content-transfer-encoding: binary”);
   print($content);

   What am I possibly doing wrong here.

   Thanks
   Crsitian

9. August 2nd, 2005 at 11:44 am Jon M

   

   Thanks to scoutt’s comment and some more searching, the following code worked for me in Firefox and IE:

   header(”Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel; name=’Excel’”);
   header(”Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=myWorksheet.xls”);
   header(”Expires: 0″); // Optional
   print “$header\n$data”;

10. September 14th, 2005 at 10:12 am Robert Simpson

    

    Great help, thanks. Amazing that while the standard indicates the server’s “Content-type” is “authoritative”, Microsoft (http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/networking/moniker/overview/appendix_a.asp) calls it “suggested”.

11. September 16th, 2005 at 12:39 pm JDS

    

    There is one more piece to the puzzle that no one seems to have mentioned. For MSIE, Under Tools->Internet Options->Advanced (tab), there is a checkbox “Do not save encrypted pages to disk”

    If this is checked, then pages are not cached which can cause similar problems as mentioned in this article. Uncheck the box.

12. September 18th, 2005 at 11:15 am Jason Karns

    

    Thanks a million for the solution. I tried, for giggles, the other suggested solutions in the comments of this post; all to no avail. The only way my spreadsheet download worked was with the cache_limiter. You saved me, Joseph. (btw, The tab order is out of whack for the comment fields. Is that intentional?)

13. December 28th, 2005 at 9:58 am Denn

    

    Will, glad I could help. What were you searching for? Perhaps I should update the entry to reflect how people are searching for a solution to this problem.

14. May 25th, 2006 at 11:35 am paul

    

    man this was bugging me out all day. thanks for the great post.

15. May 29th, 2006 at 3:54 am Moustafa Elqabbany

    

    To prevent overly-aggressive caching by IE, I had to use:
    session_cache_limiter(”must-revalidate”);

    instead of:
    session_cache_limiter(”public”);

    HTH

16. June 1st, 2006 at 10:36 pm Amit A More

    

    This works fine IN IE and save file “Oreilly Php.chm” to my desktop. But after downloading this file i have noticed that the actual size of “Oreilly Php.chm” is 1.5MB and after ckecking the size of downloaded file i.e. “Oreilly Php.chm” i am quite surprise that it was “3Kb” only also i have tried to open that file. But i have got error message “can not open the file:@MIST Store:C:\Windows\desktop\Oreilly Php.chm”.
    Why this Please Help Me! Or Reply me at “555.amit@gamil.com”

17. June 10th, 2006 at 7:51 pm Dough Boy

    

    I wanted to thank you. I had built an export class several months ago that will allow CSV, HTML, XML, and TAB files. The problem is that everything worked in Firefox. I had a request to make my class “public” and as soon as I did, I got IE’s unhelpful message.

    A quick trip to Google, and 1 search later, found your site. Took all of 5 minutes.

    Life saver!

18. June 30th, 2006 at 6:15 am FJ Caballero

    

    Hi,
    My web is hosted in a Windows server and I use ASP, instead of PHP. The following code goes well with HTTP, but fails with HTTPS:

    Any suggestion, please?

19. July 5th, 2006 at 6:56 am loonatic

    

    Mind you, all this isn’t quite enough to get downloads working in IE as of jul 2006.
    What does work is:

    header(’Content-type: application/octet-stream’);
    header(’Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=”‘.$fileName.’”‘);
    header(’Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, no-transform, must-revalidate, private’);
    header(’Expires: 0′);

    Never use: header(’Pragma: no-cache’)
    As IE simply won’t let users download your data.

    But it doesn’t stop there, the combination of HTTPS and sessions requires another tweak
    hinted at above.
    _before_ you issue a session_start() be sure to call this first:
    session_cache_limiter(’private’);

20. July 10th, 2006 at 7:16 pm Duncan

    

    I’ve just experienced similar problems getting a DB-generated CSV file to download in IE. It was within a web application using PHP sessions and I didn’t want to upset any of the session cookie or cache header settings.

    I was able to get things working satisfactorily with the following code:

    header(’Content-Type: ‘ . $mime_type);
    header(’Expires: ‘ . gmdate(’D, d M Y H:i:s’) . ‘ GMT’);
    header(’Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=”‘ . $filename . ‘”‘);

    if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘MSIE’)) {
    header(’Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0′);
    header(’Pragma: public’);
    } else {
    header(’Pragma: no-cache’);
    }

21. July 11th, 2006 at 12:46 pm chris.boxclever.ca » Blog Archive » Internet Explorer and https:// fun

    [...] #2 – IE didn’t want to accept file downloads over SSL. Total frustration. Fortunately a solution was found on http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/archives/2004/10/01/making-ie-accept-file-downloads/ [...]

22. July 20th, 2006 at 8:51 am Terminus a Quo » Blog Archive » MSIE + Dynamically Generated Downloads + HTTPS = BADNESS

    [...] After a bit of searching it seems that I was not alone with this problem. I found the solution to the problem in this blog post. It turned out to be very simple. [...]

23. July 20th, 2006 at 10:18 am Ashley Hatch

    

    Heh, my first google hit for this problem was your site. Thanks for writing this up. Simple but frustrating.

24. July 31st, 2006 at 7:41 am Kuroiryu

    

    July 31, 2006: Some of the other proposed solutions had issues, but what you need to remember is this:

    The “no-cache” and “no-store” options are telling IE to get rid of the file once it’s been launched in Excel. The problem is that IE doesn’t actually KNOW when Excel launches the file. Since newer versions of Office are slow to start up, the delay isn’t great enough, so by the time Excel is ready to open the file, IE has already deleted it. Joseph’s solution works because the only cache limiter he’s using is “public”. This haunted me for about 3 hours of solid debugging, and left me feeling like an idiot, since I had originally used a different tutorial that used “Pragma: no-cache”. ;)

25. August 30th, 2006 at 10:52 am Justin

    

    Great post and discussion. The comments about:

    if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘MSIE’)) {
    session_cache_limiter(”public”);
    }

    helped me in forcing IE to properly display a Word doc (really, an RTF doc) in SSL.

26. September 20th, 2006 at 10:25 am Bill

    

    Unfortunately, none of this has helped me with excel files. I have done it at least 30 different ways and each time it works in Firefox but never in IE!! I am about to go absoultely mad!!

    I am using PHP5 on a server runing Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat). The server is web.engr.oregonstate.edu if it helps.

    I have tried unchecking the box in IE that says “Do not save encrypted pages to disk”.

    I have tried using PEAR’s Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer to no avail, even after modifying the headers.

    I have tried echoing, printing, and even fpassthrough, with excel files, CSV files, and tab delimited files trying to get something, anything working with IE.

    I have tried the following code mentioned in other pages:

    if(!strpos(strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']), “msie”) === FALSE)
    {
    header(”HTTP/1.x 205 OK”);
    } else {
    header(”HTTP/1.x 200 OK”);
    }

    While that helps a few things(which I dont really need), it doesnt help the file serving.

    I have also tried a bunch of different combinations of the follwoing headers:

    //various headers from web
    header(”Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel”);
    header(’Content-type: application/octet-stream’);
    header(’Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel; name=”Excel”‘);
    header(’Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=”test.xls”‘);
    header(’Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=test.xls’);
    header(’Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, no-transform, must-revalidate, public’);
    header(”Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate”);
    header(”Cache-Control: no-cache, cachehack=”.time());
    header(’Cache-control: private, must-revalidate’);
    header(”Cache-Control: no-store, must-revalidate”);
    header(”Cache-Control: post-check=-1, pre-check=-1″, false);
    header(’Pragma: private’);
    header(’Pragma: public’);
    header(’Expires: 0′);
    header(”Expires: -1″);
    header(”Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT”);
    header(”Last-Modified: ” . gmdate(”D, d M Y H:i:s”) . ” GMT”);

    //headers from Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer
    header(”Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel”, false);
    header(”Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\”$filename\”", false);
    header(”Expires: 0″, false);
    header(”Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0,pre-check=0″, false);
    header(”Pragma: public”, false);

    Oh yeah. I have been trying those headers with and without both the public and private versions of the following before my session_start() even though I havent been using session variables in my latest test script:

    if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘MSIE’))
    {
    session_cache_limiter(”public”);
    }
    session_start();

    IE has been the bane of my existence for a few months now. If anyone can help I’d appreciate it. That’s awesome the stuff above worked for a lot of you. I wonder if its all about older versions of IE. Speaking of which the verion on my development computer as well as most of the computers around campus are IE 6.0.2900…

    -Bill

27. October 2nd, 2006 at 6:49 pm Patrick

    

    Thank you! You saved my life.

28. October 20th, 2006 at 11:36 am matt

    

    Man, thank you thank you…I had a heck of a time finding a solution until I finally stumbled across your page….live saver.

29. November 1st, 2006 at 4:30 pm Eric Jones

    

    Scott–where have you been for the last 6 hours! I’m so glad I stumbled across your site, because my issues are now solved! You are the MAN!!

30. November 6th, 2006 at 6:21 am Kalle Lundgren

    

    Cheers! Saved me a few hours of crawling! :)

31. November 10th, 2006 at 10:26 pm luvpig

    

    thanks allot for the info, have been battling with this problem all morning. Even in IE7 it’s not fixed! WEAK!

32. December 1st, 2006 at 4:39 am Harry School

    

    Thanks Duncan. Your solution worked for me.

    - php generated xls and doc
    - https site

    Thanks again.

    Harry

    # Duncan said on July 10th, 2006 at 7:16 pm

    I’ve just experienced similar problems getting a DB-generated CSV file to download in IE. It was within a web application using PHP sessions and I didn’t want to upset any of the session cookie or cache header settings.

    I was able to get things working satisfactorily with the following code:

    header(’Content-Type: ‘ . $mime_type);
    header(’Expires: ‘ . gmdate(’D, d M Y H:i:s’) . ‘ GMT’);
    header(’Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=”‘ . $filename . ‘”‘);

    if(strpos($_SERVER[’HTTP_USER_AGENT’], ‘MSIE’)) {
    header(’Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0′);
    header(’Pragma: public’);
    } else {
    header(’Pragma: no-cache’);
    }

33. December 4th, 2006 at 8:39 am Juan

    

    thanks yo save my life.

34. December 5th, 2006 at 11:03 am Satish Rao

    

    I have a similar problem with IE 6.0 where I am using ASP.NET for downloading (using HTTP Headers)

    Response.AddHeader(”Content-Type”,”application/octet-stream”)
    Response.AddHeader(”Content-Disposition”,”attachment; filename=abc.tif”)
    Response.WriteBinary(oImageData)

    I works fine about 30% of time, but the remaining time it behaves odd. Sometimes it does not show SAVEAS dialog box, SomeTimes it shows but fails to Show FileSave DialogBox and Some times it does nothing.

    This is a very patchy and un-predictable behaviour.
    Can anyone tell me what the problem might be.

    1. File Size
    2. Some settings on IE or the IIS 6.0 Web server

    It is driving me and our client crazy.

35. December 22nd, 2006 at 6:43 am Paul Stam

    

    muchos gracias!

    now it is also working in IE and I have been looking for quite some time!

36. December 29th, 2006 at 12:57 pm James R. Leu

    

    I found this article and it started me down the right path, but was not the definitive answer, so I wanted to share my finding in hopes of helping others. After the fact I was able to recongnize that some of the above posters came to the same conclusions as me, but no one explicitly stated them.

    My environment is SSL, PDF or RTF download, IE6+, my users where getting the “file could not be written to the cache” error.

    This MS KB entry gives the details (and suggests horrible registry hacks)

    http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=323308

    I choose a simpler route, I made sure my web application did not send any of the following:

    Cache-control:no-store
    Cache-control:no-cache
    Pragma: no-cache

    and then make my users have unchecked the “Do not save encrypted pages to disk” in “Internet Options / Advanced” (unchecked _is_ the default setting, but some users have changed it)

37. January 2nd, 2007 at 6:58 am Daniel

    

    Thank you so much! It finally works!!

38. January 15th, 2007 at 1:29 am the downside » Internet Explorer and file download on HTTPS

    [...] Comment nr. 24 by Kuroiryu in Joseph Scotts blog explains why things are not working as expected: [...]

39. January 19th, 2007 at 10:22 am Ryan

    

    You just saved me a lot of time. Much appreciated.

40. January 22nd, 2007 at 3:50 am bill

    

    Cheers,
    I’m not sure if I’m happy to have found the solution or p1ssed off that I’ve wasted 4 hours of my life because of 3 lines of IE hack. If you’re interested it is still needed in ie 7!

    Right I’m off to find out what the hell a session cache limiter is

41. February 13th, 2007 at 6:11 am Shovels

    

    Having developed the site mainly in Firefox only to start testing to find that bl00dy IE has a bug – Getting that sicky feeling knowing there’s such a tight deadline.

    All I can say is thanks! This was one of the first pages I came across and it solved it a peach.

    Cheers again.

42. February 19th, 2007 at 8:36 pm dranger

    

    Good gravy. I have yet more reason to loathe IE. This solution isn’t even on Microsoft’s article about the issue.

43. March 7th, 2007 at 2:25 pm sg347

    

    This is a very useful posting and especially the one that worked for me :

    header(’Content-type: application/octet-stream’);
    header(’Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=”‘.$fileName.’”‘);private’);
    header(’Expires: 0′);

    Cheers!

44. March 28th, 2007 at 10:51 pm Kevin

    

    Good God after banging my head against my keyboard for the better part of the day I found this posting.

    Code did the trick

    You saved my melon and my keyboard from a truely horrific end.

    Thanks!!!

45. March 30th, 2007 at 12:29 am Cyinner

    

    I have the same problem, however when i remove session_start(), it works then in IE.

    Seems like session_start does something to the headers, which causes some issues for IE.

46. May 3rd, 2007 at 5:11 pm exiled

    

    MANY, MANY THANKS!

47. May 4th, 2007 at 10:38 am chris

    

    Well, I’ve read all the comments and tried all of them on ie7 and nothing works, bill tried the same stuff as me and his is now working, what did you do in the end BILL?????

48. May 30th, 2007 at 6:20 am Lance

    

    Worked like a charm and saved tons of worry and time spent trying to understand m$oft.

    Thanks!!!

49. June 26th, 2007 at 6:58 am yeago works » Blog Archive » Fixing File Download Errors in IE with ASP Classic

    [...] Making IE Accept File Downloads [...]

50. June 26th, 2007 at 7:13 am Yeago

    

    An ASP solution

    http://yeago.net/works/fixing-file-download-errors-in-ie-with-asp-classic

51. June 28th, 2007 at 3:32 am Matt Ryan

    

    Im having the same problem but were using asp.net and none of the soutions above work for asp.net.

    Weve tried all but the “session_cache_limiter(”public”);” stuff as i cant seem to find an equivalent in dotnet?

    Please someonw help me im stuff and the deadline ive got is getting nearer and i have no solution as yet…

    Thanks
    Matt

52. July 9th, 2007 at 9:16 am Rafa

    

    for: Moustafa Elqabbany

    You are the best!!! Thanks for your help.

    session_cache_limiter(”must-revalidate”);

    this is the solution for the “new” IE.

53. July 29th, 2007 at 3:57 pm James

    

    I love you for posting this, and Google for helping me find it… saved me about 2 hours work!!! legend

54. September 5th, 2007 at 9:18 am Nate

    

    Thanks! Just what I was looking for.

55. October 4th, 2007 at 2:30 pm Vlad

    

    > session_cache_limiter(”must-revalidate”);

    it work!!!

56. November 16th, 2007 at 6:18 am Piotr

    

    After 3 years it’s still working. Thanks a lot!!!

    IE7 still have this bug (what a sh*t!).

57. January 30th, 2008 at 8:32 am Florin

    

    Still needed for IE. Thanks a lot.

58. January 30th, 2008 at 9:44 am Joseph Scott

    

    Glad people are still finding this helpful. Would be nice to have a version of IE that didn’t need this though.

59. February 15th, 2008 at 10:25 pm gavintat

    

    I have tried to follow the instructions mentioned above.
    But it does not work properly for https too.
    I find out that the ‘header’ function does not run in https. As I coded it
    header(”Location: xxx.html”);
    which would not redirect by itself.
    I had to change it to javascript (window.location).
    What’s the problem with my server/ my coding?I have tried many different combination of the code mentioned…What should I change in server config or sth else?

    Please help me T.T

    if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘MSIE’))
    {
    session_cache_limiter(’public’);
    }

    header(’Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel’);
    header(”Content-Disposition: inline; filename=”xxx.xls”);
    header(’Expires: 0′, false);
    header(’Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0,pre-check=0′);
    header(’Pragma: public’);

60. February 21st, 2008 at 7:27 am Dave Matthews

    

    Isn’t it annoying when you get everything perfect, then try IE to find it doesn’t work.

    Change to inline instead of attachment and it works…

61. February 27th, 2008 at 8:02 am Hunt

    

    I am having an issue with IE 6 and MS Excel 2000. When I launch the csv file into IE from my jsp for some reason Excel puts all the data into the first column of the excel document showing the commas.

    This WORKS in Excel 2000 with IE6. Its only on a couple workstations in my office. Also, if I ‘Save’ the csv documnet to a know location and then open it with Excel…its parsed into columns just fine so their is something in the way IE and Excel are communicating about the file type that is an issue.

    response.setHeader(”Cache-Control”, “cache”);
    response.setContentType(”application/binary”);
    response.setHeader(”Content-Disposition”, “inline; filename=”+csv_filename );

    Has anyone else experienced this?

    Also, you’ll see that I am setting Cache-Control to ‘cache’. If I try to set it to ‘no-cache’, IE will not pickup the ‘filename’ parameter within the Content-Disposition header……similar to mentioned here.

    Thank You

62. February 27th, 2008 at 8:03 am Hunt

    

    Sorry – I meant to say in the second paragraph ‘This WORKS in Excel 2002 with IE6 and DOES NOT work in Excel 2000′

    very sorry

63. March 13th, 2008 at 3:19 am EduHL

    

    You can try with this in IE:

    Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced (tab), checkbox “[x] Do not save encrypted pages to disk” prevented IE from saving the exported file to its browser cache (and consequently from opening it afterwards).

    In my case, unchecking this setting, fixed the problem.

    Regards,

    Edu.

64. May 9th, 2008 at 3:22 am Brijendra Singh Rajput

    

    Hi Duncan,
    Thanks a million to you solution.I changed a module in my ERP for excel export.but it was triggering errors in IE.i worked for more than 10 Hours for this problem.But you saved my a lot of time.
    Thanks a lat

65. May 14th, 2008 at 4:46 am Kamaljith

    

    Thanks.
    It worked for me.

66. May 28th, 2008 at 4:15 am Meenu

    

    I m not able to export excel sheet in IE using HTTPS
    it is running in firefox and safari.

67. June 4th, 2008 at 7:15 am John

    

    @Jon M

    Thanks your solution of:

    header(”Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel; name=’Excel’”);
    header(”Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=myWorksheet.xls”);
    header(”Expires: 0?); // Optional
    print “$header\n$data”;

    works for me using Firefox 2 and IE 7 – thats in PHP over https://

    Cheers

68. August 12th, 2008 at 7:47 am hbourchi

    

    Duncan!

    Your code solved my problem. Thanks!

    if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘MSIE’)) {
    header(’Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0?);
    header(’Pragma: public’);
    } else {
    header(’Pragma: no-cache’);
    }

69. September 16th, 2008 at 8:38 am Shaun

    

    There is a easy solution to the SSL problem here:

    http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.header.php#83219

70. September 30th, 2008 at 4:16 pm Michael Rodriguez

    

    Help, I have IE6 and I have directory browsing turned on so that Logs can get pulled via http://x:8181/LogFiles. I don’t want to have to write .asp to enumerate as that would mean having to add ASP as an allowed extension unnecessariy.

    I see a lot of scripting solutions, but can I manipulate the custom headers in IE to yield the same results for a directory that has Browsing turned on. The file extensions are currently the date in a YYYYMMDD format.

    thanks

    Michael

71. October 12th, 2008 at 12:43 pm Radek Sipka

    

    Thanks, your solution worked, and probably saved me a lot of work. so thanks!!

72. November 10th, 2008 at 11:52 am Steve

    

    Thank you for this. You definitely saved me some time.

73. November 12th, 2008 at 1:26 am Lutz Mahle

    

    I lost my nervs in a couple of weeks to solve this problem on our website. Great Hint! Thank you so much!
    Now our CSV-download works fine, only inserting these small four lines of code!

74. November 25th, 2008 at 6:11 am jan

    

    Thanks alot … been looking for this for ages!!

    Kind regards,

75. December 17th, 2008 at 12:21 am Jason

    

    You star! That one completely stumped me… You’re a bloody legend.

76. December 29th, 2008 at 2:30 am Andy

    

    Hi,
    I am facing problem while opening a text file using IE6. It gives an error message like “C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\\file[1].csv could not be found.

    After doing google I came to know that it is a know issue with IE6 (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum88/5891.htm ) But mentioned fix did not work in my case. This is how I am setting http header:

    header(”Cache-Control: “);
    header(”Pragma: “);
    header(’Content-type: application/octet-stream’);
    header(’Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=”‘ . $file . ‘.txt”‘); //default extension to .txt for easier open)

    But problem still persist. One workaround is to replace a .txt format to .doc / .rtf, In that case I am able to open file using MS word, but issue will be when someone trying to open a file where don’t have MS word.

    Please Help. I also tried with all the combination for header Pragma and Cache-Control mentioned on this page.

77. February 3rd, 2009 at 2:10 pm Meesh

    

    Thank you thank you thank you!!!! This saved me a massive headache.. well, I had one starting until I found your helpful article.. your solution worked.
    Gracias merci and danke schoen!!!

78. February 23rd, 2009 at 4:09 am pkachhia

    

    Hi,
    I have the problem which is something related to this post.
    I have trying to download the file using the download code.
    It’s work fine in IE7, Mozilla, chrome but it is not works in IE6.
    The most socking thing is , few days ago , it is working in all the browsers, even in IE6. But today i got this error.When I have trying to use IE6 for download it shows the following message:
    “Internet explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later.”
    Can any body help me?

    Regards,
    Pkachhia

79. March 9th, 2009 at 6:13 pm sandy

    

    I am running into similar problem and tried all the combination given in this post but alas!
    I have asp page over SSL and trying to generate the CSV file but not working. Any help?
    esponse.Clear
    Response.AddHeader “Pragma: public”
    Response.AddHeader “Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, no-transform, must-revalidate, private”;
    Response.AddHeader “Title”, “My Report Results”
    Response.ContentType = “text/csv”
    Response.AddHeader “Content-disposition”, “Attachment;filename=Myreport.csv”

80. March 23rd, 2009 at 6:46 am stephan

    

    thanks for that. additionally the particular IE’s here are only happy if content-type header offers encoding=… as well.

    e.g.
    header(’Content-type: application/octet-stream; encoding=UTF-8′);

81. March 25th, 2009 at 12:22 pm Gordon

    

    I’m still having trouble after looking through and trying your suggestion and those in the comments. I’m running ASP.NET 2.0, IIS, Win2003.

    I’m generating a CSV file for users to download when they click a button on a page (the page is SiteReports.aspx). Without SSL, it works great in FF and IE7. With SSL (which I need to do), it works great in FF, but in IE7:

    -> If I have ContentType set to ‘application/octet-stream’, I get a file download prompt, but the filename I gave it is replaced with ‘SiteReports_aspx’, with no extension, so if they user chooses ‘open’ from the download prompt, it opens as plain text within IE.
    -> If I have ContentType set to anything else, I get ‘Internet Explorer cannot download SiteReports.aspx from etc…’.

    I don’t understand why it tries to download something with a different filename than the one I specified in Content-Disposition. I’m currently setting up my headers like this:

    Response.Clear();
    Response.Charset = String.Empty;
    Response.ContentType = “application/octet-stream”;
    Response.AddHeader(”Pragma”, “public”);
    Response.AddHeader(”Cache-Control”, “max-age=10″);
    Response.AddHeader(”Content-Disposition”, “attachment; filename=test.csv”);
    Response.Write(fileContents);
    Response.End();

    Any ideas? Thanks.

82. March 31st, 2009 at 4:35 pm Jody

    

    Thanks Duncan, your method works for my site which uses SSL that annoys the crap out of me. For both IE and FF> :) Whee now I can work better!

83. April 3rd, 2009 at 5:42 pm Glen H. Barratt

    

    Thank you so much. Your fix was the only one that worked for me. The “if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘MSIE’)) session_cache_limiter(”public”);” that is.