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I have a page on my website that pulls out information from a table and is formatted with css.

I can't find a way to save the page as is, as a text or pdf file. I found a pdf site that does this http://pdfmyurl.com/ but I was hoping to do the same thing on my own site wihtout external sites.

The web page has a session making sure the user is logged in, and depending on the user_id depends what data is pulled out the database. To clarify, I want the users to be able to view this page. On the page I was hoping for a "SAVE TO COMPUTER" button that would save that page as is.

I found

<?php

 //Link to download file...
 $url = "savechoice.php";

 //Code to get the file...
 $data = file_get_contents($url);

 //save as?
 $filename = "test.txt";

 //save the file...
 $fh = fopen($filename,"w");
 fwrite($fh,$data);
 fclose($fh);

 //display link to the file you just saved...
 echo "<a href='".$filename."'>Click Here</a> to download the file...";
?>

But this just saves the page as text including the php not executed. I also changed the url to the full url and although running the PHP comes back blank as the session isn't recognised.

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  • I realise I hadn't clarified much so apologies! Page is linked to and has a session. The page checks first if the user is logged in and THEN pulls out info depending on their user id the information from the database. Trying some of these suggestions (haven't tried them all~ will do when I get back on this) have only gave me an empty page as it doesn't recognise the session running. Will see if other suggestions work for this. Commented Mar 11, 2013 at 17:39

4 Answers 4

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Please consider using file_put_contents(). Also verify that you have write privileges in the server. You can do this by using is_writable().

But this just saves the page as text including the php. -> Do you want the server to process savechoice.php? This is totally different. When you open files using file_get_contents(), it gets the file exactly how you see it when you open the file. It will not execute the file.

You need to change how savechoice.php works. If it's a script that has some output, you can instead put the output in a variable which you will place in your $data. For example:

savechoice.php

<?php
echo 'Hello World!';
?>

Change that to something like this:

<?php
$echo = 'Hello World!';
?>

In your other file, you can simply use file_put_contents($echo); after calling savechoice.php using require().

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Comments

1

You'd probably want something more like this:

ob_start();
include('savechoice.php');
$text = ob_get_clean();

but really, the best method is to modify your code in savechoice.php to be callable as a function, so you can have more like:

$text = get_choice(...);

instead, which the appropriate logic to output ONLY the data you want, without the html wrapping paper. Invoking HTTP requests to your own server is a pointless waste of resources in almost all usage cases, especially when you're using sessions (and particularly standard file-based sessions).

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1

If you want to get the output of the file instead of the raw contents, you need to make sure that the file is executed as php.

You can include it (I see there already is another answer...) or you can use:

$url = "http://localhost/path/to/file/savechoice.php";

with your original code to make sure the file gets processed by the web-server.

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The file does execute the PHP but unfortunately due to the session it turns up blank. I added more information to the original post.
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That is because you are loading the file, not the url of the file.

Suppose your site's domain is http://www.example.com and that the file "savechoice.php" is in the web root. If you change the $url to 

$url = "http://www.example.com/savechoice.php";

The php in the file will then be interpreted and you will see the web page and not the php.

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1 Comment

I did this and although the PHP ran, it did not recognise the session. Added more information now.

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