in PHP How to download the file from its file path? - php

Question

I am new to PHP and trying my hands into it. I am creating a file and writing back to it. Creating a file in some path and writing to it, works fine for me. But when i try to download the same file from the same path, its not getting downloaded instead I'm getting empty file.
header('Content-type: text/xml');
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=".'check.xml');
header("Content-Length: " . filesize('./download/'.$_SESSION['user_name'].'/check.xml'));
readfile('download/'.$_SESSION['user_name'].'/check.xml');
exit;
Hi, Thanks for everyone. But I saw very unusual thing. When i downloaded the file, I didn't got the full file.
Why this case

Answer 1

Try removing ./ from the start of the filepath, like follows:
header('Content-type: text/xml');
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=".'check.xml');
header("Content-Length: " . filesize('download/'.$_SESSION['user_name'].'/check.xml'));
readfile('download/'.$_SESSION['user_name'].'/check.xml');
exit;
With Linux file systems, ./ means the root, so that's the equivalent of / and ../ means the directory above the current directory. It's best to use absolute file paths, but simply removing the ./ should suffice.

Answer 2

You will also need to flush the write buffers of PHP using flush()
Here is a good working function to download a file
Here is a version adapted from that page:
public static function downloadFile($fileName) {
$filePath = $fileName;
$size = filesize($filePath);
// Taken from http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/08/12/how-to-force-file-download-with-php/
header("Content-type: text/plain");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$fileName\"");
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");
header("Accept-Ranges: bytes");
// The three lines below basically make the download non-cacheable
header("Cache-control: private");
header("Pragma: private");
header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT");
header("Content-Length: " . $size);
if ($file = fopen($filePath, "r")) {
$buffer = fread($file, $size); // this only works for small files!
print $buffer;
flush();
fclose($file);
}
}