CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptdownloadwget
Sangeeth Saravanaraj
Sangeeth Saravanaraj

Reputation: 16597

What is the equivalent of wget in javascript to download a file from a given url?

"wget http://www.example.com/file.doc" downloads that file to the local disk.

What is the equivalent of the above in javascript? for example, consider the following html snippet.

<html>
<head>
   <script language="JavaScript">
      function download_file() {
         var url = "http://www.example.com/file.doc"
         //
         // Question: 
         //
         // what should be done here to download 
         // the file in the url?
         //
      }
   </script>
</head>
<body>
   <input type="button" value="Download" onclick="download_file()">
</body>
</html>

Please suggest a solution that is compliant with all the browsers.

Sangeeth.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 16619

Answers (3)

Sangeeth Saravanaraj
Sangeeth Saravanaraj

Reputation: 16597

After a exploring more than a month, with a help of my friend, we were able to find out the following.

The website where the file is hosted is not allowing us to download the file using window.location = url; or window.open(url);

Finally we had to use the data-downloadurl support from HTML5 as follows 

<a href="<url-goes-here>" data-downloadurl="audio/mpeg:<filename-goes-here>:<url-goes-here>" download="<filename-goes-here>">Click here to download the file</a>

We embed this html into the host html and when clicked on the link, it triggers the download.

Upvotes: 3

hafichuk
hafichuk

Reputation: 10781

Why not use:

 function download_file() {
   var url = "http://www.example.com/file.doc"
   window.location = url;
 }

See https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/window.location

If you need to open this in a new window/tab first then use:

 function download_file() {
   var url = "http://www.example.com/file.doc"
   window.open(url);
 }

See https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/window.open

Upvotes: 1

Wasim Karani
Wasim Karani

Reputation: 8886

First thing that always comes in mind of every answerer to this question is executing wget shell command from java script.I'm almost certain that that's not possible because of major security risk.

You pretty much need to have ajax which sends command to command line either through php, or another scripting language via ajax...

You could probably make that happen with something like http://www.phantomjs.org/
I am saying probably because I read it from somewhere.

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions