force download in php external url

[Jeevan25]

i want the user to bed forced to download when they click a link. This code works fine if the file is in the same server.<?php// We'll be outputting a PDFheader('Content-type: application/pdf');// It will be called downloaded.pdfheader('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="downloaded.pdf"');// The PDF source is in original.pdfreadfile('original.pdf');?> but what do i do if the file is on another server, like youtube or something?I tried readfile('http://www.domain.com/file.pdf');but that downloads like a 5KB file. Is this possible?

[justsomeguy]

It's possible to download a 5KB file. Did you check to make sure it's the right file? Does it open? You can use either readfile or file_get_contents to display the file if the fopen wrappers are enabled on the server, or you can also use fopen and fread to output the file.

[Jeevan25]

I tried echo (file_get_contents('http://domain.com/file.pdf')); but its going to the script that is called and outputting its contents.

[justsomeguy]

What do you mean, it's displaying the contents of the PHP script that includes the file_get_contents function?

[Jeevan25]

yeah instead of displaying the pdf file contents, its displaying contents of the file that forces the user to download the file.

[justsomeguy]

Hmm. It should never do that, it shouldn't display the PHP code. If it's displaying the PHP code it sounds more like the server isn't running the PHP script, it's just displaying the code as text. Are you sure the code is running? If you just echo a string, do you see the string or do you see the echo statement? file_get_contents returns a string, so all you're doing here is echoing a string, you shouldn't see the code.

[Jeevan25]

the thing is i want the user to download an external file, but with the file name that i set. i know they can rename while saving, but i want the default to be mine. you know how? thanks

[justsomeguy]

The filename comes from this header:header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="downloaded.pdf"');The call to readfile or file_get_contents obviously needs to be the file you actually want to read, not the name of the file you want to save it as.