How to make a browser display a "save as dialog" so the user can save the content of a string to a file on his system?

In case anyone is still wondering...

I did it like this:

<a href="data:application/xml;charset=utf-8,your code here" download="filename.html">Save</a>

cant remember my source but it uses the following techniques\features:

1. html5 download attribute
2. data uri's

Found the reference:

http://paxcel.net/blog/savedownload-file-using-html5-javascript-the-download-attribute-2/

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EDIT: As you can gather from the comments this does NOT work in

1. Internet Explorer (works in Edge v13 though)
2. iOS Safari
3. Opera Mini

http://caniuse.com/#feat=download

There is a javascript library for this, see FileSaver.js on Github

However the saveAs() function won't send pure string to the browser, you need to convert it to blob:

function data2blob(data, isBase64) {
  var chars = "";

  if (isBase64)
    chars = atob(data);
  else
    chars = data;

  var bytes = new Array(chars.length);
  for (var i = 0; i < chars.length; i++) {
    bytes[i] = chars.charCodeAt(i);
  }

  var blob = new Blob([new Uint8Array(bytes)]);
  return blob;
}

and then call saveAs on the blob, as like:

var myString = "my string with some stuff";
saveAs( data2blob(myString), "myString.txt" );

Of course remember to include the above-mentioned javascript library on your webpage using <script src=FileSaver.js>

This is possible using this cross browser javascript implementation of the HTML5 saveAs function: https://github.com/koffsyrup/FileSaver.js

If all you want to do is save text then the above script works in all browsers(including all versions of IE), using nothing but JS.