How to use the CSV MIME-type?

php csv http-headers mime
theman_on_vista picture theman_on_vista · Dec 29, 2008 · Viewed 190.3k times · Source

In a web application I am working on, the user can click on a link to a CSV file. There is no header set for the mime-type, so the browser just renders it as text. I would like for this file to be sent as a .csv file, so the user can directly open it with calc, excel, gnumeric, etc. 

header('Content-Type: text/csv');
echo "cell 1, cell 2";

This code works as expected on my computer (Isn't that how it always is?) but does not work on another computer.

My browser is a nightly build of FF 3.0.1 (on linux). The browsers it did not work in were IE 7 and FF 3.0 (on windows)

Are there any quirks I am unaware of?

Answer

Sean Bright picture Sean Bright · Dec 29, 2008

You could try to force the browser to open a "Save As..." dialog by doing something like:

header('Content-type: text/csv');
header('Content-disposition: attachment;filename=MyVerySpecial.csv');
echo "cell 1, cell 2";

Which should work across most major browsers.

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