Downloading Large CSV FIles via HREF

Andrew on 2016-09-01

I had a web application that parsed CSV files. After parsing, the CSV would be downloadable in a href tag. Small CSV files were fine. Once I started parsing large ones, downloading it resulted in Failed - Network error. I suspected that it is because of href's length limit.

The solution is to use a Blob.

Before

var csvData = 'data:application/csv;charset=utf-8,' + encodeURIComponent(unparsed);
$('#download').attr('href', csvData);

After using Blob

var csvData = new Blob([unparsed], { type: 'text/csv' });
$('#download').attr('href', URL.createObjectURL(csvData));