How do I get csv file to download on IE? Works on firefox

Question

I\'m struggling with an odd error. I have a simple web app that grabs stuff from a DB then outputs it as a downloadable csv file. It works on firefox and chrome, but IE fail

Answer 1

We recently ran into this problem ourselves. See this MSKB article

These are the headers we ended up having to use to get it to work over SSL.

header("Expires: Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT");
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT");
header("Pragma: public");
header("Expires: 0");
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
header("Cache-Control: public");
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$file_name\";");
header("Content-length: " . strlen($csv_string));

Answer 2

Some time ago I've got a problem with IE6 opening pdf files, and crashing when AdobeReader 6.0 was installed and tried to open file in browser window. Than I found somewhere this header:

header('Content-Type: application/force-download');

And it solved the problem, every pdf file was downloaded and opened in Adobe instead of IE.

Answer 3

The solution for me was:

header_remove(); 
header('Content-Type: text/csv'); 
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=brokerlist.csv'); 
echo $content;

Answer 4

The only extra code I had to add for IE to work with SSL was: header("Pragma: public"); So my headers look like this now:

 header("Pragma: public");  
 header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
 header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=some_filename.csv");

Answer 5

Don't we love IE? :)

Try using those headers:

  header("Pragma: public");
  header("Expires: 0");
  header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
  header("Cache-Control: private",false);
  header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
  header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"exportevent.csv\";" );
  header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary"); 

I think that the octet-stream content type forces IE to download the file.

Answer 6

We have just had the same issue and after adding many headers and getting a working link I then removed them one by one and found the key one for us was "Cache-Control: public" so in the end we just had

header("Cache-Control: public"); 
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=some_filename.csv");

which worked fine.