How to make a browser display a “save as dialog” so the user can save the content of a string to a file on his system?

Question

How can I make a browser display a "save as dialog" so the user can save the content of a string to a file on his system?

For example:

var myString = "my string with some stuff";
save_to_filesystem(myString,"myString.txt");

Resulting in something like this:

Answer 1

In case anyone is still wondering...

I did it like this:

<a href="data:application/xml;charset=utf-8,your code here" download="filename.html">Save</a>

cant remember my source but it uses the following techniques\features:

1. html5 download attribute
2. data uri's

Found the reference:

http://paxcel.net/blog/savedownload-file-using-html5-javascript-the-download-attribute-2/

---

EDIT: As you can gather from the comments this does NOT work in

1. Internet Explorer (works in Edge v13 though)
2. Safari
3. iOS Safari
4. Opera Mini
5. Android Browser (4.3 and lower)

http://caniuse.com/#feat=download

Answer 2

This is possible using this cross browser javascript implementation of the HTML5 saveAs function: https://github.com/koffsyrup/FileSaver.js

If all you want to do is save text then the above script works in all browsers(including all versions of IE), using nothing but JS.

Answer 3

There is a javascript library for this, see FileSaver.js on Github

However the saveAs() function won't send pure string to the browser, you need to convert it to blob:

function data2blob(data, isBase64) {
  var chars = "";

  if (isBase64)
    chars = atob(data);
  else
    chars = data;

  var bytes = new Array(chars.length);
  for (var i = 0; i < chars.length; i++) {
    bytes[i] = chars.charCodeAt(i);
  }

  var blob = new Blob([new Uint8Array(bytes)]);
  return blob;
}

and then call saveAs on the blob, as like:

var myString = "my string with some stuff";
saveAs( data2blob(myString), "myString.txt" );

Of course remember to include the above-mentioned javascript library on your webpage using <script src=FileSaver.js>

Answer 4

Using execComand:

<input type="button" name="save" value="Save" onclick="javascript:document.execCommand('SaveAs','true','your_file.txt')">

In the next link: execCommand