Text Downloadable Files with PHP

I needed to create a file which had to be downloaded. The file had to be in plain text and contents from file come from database. Because I didn't had a separate folder for each user I couldn't write the information to a file to the server and put a link in order the user to download it. I even try to other formats like .xls, .doc, .csv and it works really nice.

Code for downloadable file:

<?
header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"your_file.txt\"");
echo 'Text for downloadable file';  
?>

1. Code for CSV Downloadable file

The real magic comes when you wanna make csv file downloadable. You can read data from a mysql table and write the contents to a csv file. You should only read contents from a table and using echo output to the file.

<?
header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"your_file.csv\"");
$connect = mysql_connect($server, $user, $password)
or die ("MySQL Database Connect Error"); 
$resultcsv = mysql_db_query($database, "select * from $csvTable");
while ($query = mysql_fetch_array($resultcsv)) 
{ 
echo $query["Name"].",".$query["City"]."\n";
}
mysql_close($connect);
?>

2. Code for Microsoft Excel (.xls) downloadable file

Code for generating a excel downloadble file:

<?
header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"your_file.xls\"");
$connect = mysql_connect($server, $user, $password)
or die ("MySQL Database Connect Error"); 
$resultxls = mysql_db_query($database, "select * from $xlsTable");
while ($query = mysql_fetch_array($resultxls)) 	{ 
echo $query["Name"]."\t".$query["City"]."\n";
}
mysql_close($connect);
?>

3. Code for Microsoft Word (.doc) downloadable file

You can even make a downloadable .doc files by changing the file extension to doc.

<?
header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"your_file.doc\"");
echo 'Contents of Word Document.';  
?>