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

javascript download wget

14,141

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

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

14,141

Author by

Sangeeth Saravanaraj

An enthusiastic programmer!

Updated on June 05, 2022

Comments

Sangeeth Saravanaraj almost 2 years

"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.