John Davidson

Message:

I have a really simple question. I have this Controller in my Laravel application, that returns a zip file download, depending on what the user selected. So far so good. I also have this echo just before the return:

echo "<script> alert('test') </script>";



return response()->download(public_path($fileName));

My question is: the "echo" is not being executed, but if i remove the return, it is executed.. isn't the "echo" supposed to execute before the return ? Why is it not being executed?

---

My Answer:
In PHP, the echo statement outputs data to the browser immediately. However, when you use the return statement, it stops the execution of the current function and returns a value to the caller. In this case, the return response()->download() function is sending the zip file download to the browser, so the echo statement is not being executed before the return.

If you want to display an alert before the file download, you can use JavaScript to trigger the download after the alert is shown. Here's an example:

echo "";

In this example, the alert will be shown first, and then the browser will be redirected to the "/download-file" route, where you can handle the file download.