punch_card_don has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Masked Monks,

After generating a csv file with my Perl script, I want to download it to the client. No problem, you say, just use http headers: 

print "Content-type: text/csv";
print "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=my_file.csv\n\n";

[download]
Which I've done, and the file does download, BUT, the filename is given as the name of the Perl script file, not the filename I set, my_file.csv.

What silly thing have I forgotten?

Thanks.




Forget that fear of gravity,
Get a little savagery in your life.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Output CSV-file, can't get filename recognized.
by moritz (Cardinal) on Jan 30, 2008 at 18:54 UTC
    Have you tried it with different browsers? User agents are pretty much free to ignore any Content-Disposition header.

    BTW this post talks about \n being possibly harmful.

[reply]
[d/l]
      Genius. Pure genius.

      The post you linked to reminded me to check my "\n", and as you'll see on double-checking my original post, I forgot a "\n" at the end of the first line. Fixing that made it work.

      Thanks.

[reply]
        ... and the missing newline explains exactly what happened:
        The browser treated everything up to the first newline as a content-type, didn't recognize it, and therefore opened as "save as" dialog instead of displaying it.

        And it had no filename specification, so it used the script name from the URL.

[reply]

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