Writing string to file and force download in PHP

Question

I'm looking into methods of how to create a file from a string, this could be plain text would save as .txt and php as .php etc but I was hoping to get some insight into it

**I found this code

$file = 'people.txt';
// Open the file to get existing content
$current = file_get_contents($file);
// Append a new person to the file
$current .= "John Smith\n";
// Write the contents back to the file
file_put_contents($file, $current);

But would I need to have people.txt saved on my server?

The force download part

header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"" . basename($File) . "\"");
header("Content-Type: application/force-download");
header("Content-Length: " . filesize($File));
header("Connection: close");

Where would I need to house the above, I'm assuming the code is right to force download my ready made file?

Answer 1

You do not need to write the string to a file in order to send it to the browser. See the following example, which will prompt your UA to attempt to download a file called "sample.txt" containing the value of $str:

<?php

$str = "Some pseudo-random
text spanning
multiple lines";

header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="sample.txt"');
header('Content-Type: text/plain'); # Don't use application/force-download - it's not a real MIME type, and the Content-Disposition header is sufficient
header('Content-Length: ' . strlen($str));
header('Connection: close');


echo $str;