Internet explorer underscore file download

Dowload While Retaining (or Fixing) the Extension

There are at least two ways of dealing with the possibility that Internet Explorer might change a file extension. The first and recommended procedure is to use the Save target as method. The second is to fix the file extension after the download. Even if you use the recommended Save target as approach, you should be aware of how to fix the extension after downloading a file.

Using the "Save Target As" method

The following steps will allow you download files with and extension without having to clean-up the file extensions later.

The file should now be saved as a plain text document with the extension it has on the ME 352 or NMM web site.

Figure 3: Dialog box for downloading a text file with the "Save Target As" method.

Fixing the Extension After Download

The problem with file extensions occurs if you use an obvious way to download a file:

If you follow this sequence in Internet Explorer, the Save as step causes the problem. Figure 4 shows the dialog box that Internet Explorer presents when you select "Save As" from the "File" menu. In particular, this is the dialog box that appears if you try to save the file from the preceding examples.

Figure 4: The Internet Explorer dialog box that results from clicking "Save As" when you are viewing a document displayed in a browser window.

Note that the title of the dialog box in Figure 4 is "Save Web Page". Also note that the file name has been changed from to : the period has been replaced with an underscore. Although the user clicked on a link to a file, IE ignores the original file extension and assumes you want to display the contents of the browser window as an HTML document. To my knowledge, there is no graceful way to recover other than clicking the back button and using the Save Target As method described above.

To complete the thread of the current example, suppose that you want to save the file anyway, even though IE thinks you want to save it as an HTML document. The solution is to select "Text File (*.txt)" in the "Save as type" field near the bottom of the dialog box. Doing so in IE version 6, causes the file to be saved in the target directory. To make this file useful — or to at least return it to its original name — you need to change the file extension in the Windows file browser. Here are the steps:

The warning about changing file extensions is a ruse to scare inexperienced users from straying from the Microsoft fold. Figure 5 shows the warning message.

Figure 5: The warning message about changing a file extension.

If you change the file extension to one that is not currently recognized by Windows, then you will not damage the file. Rather, when you double click on that file (with the changed extension) you will get a message indicating that Windows does not know which application should be used to open the file. The only problem is that the built-in association with a particular application is lost. When you double-click on a file that is not associated with any application, windows presents you with a dialog box for choosing the application for opening the file. If you do not wish to use that dialog box, you can restore the association by changing the extension back to one that is recognized by Windows.

A Rant

Note that the warning message in Figure 5 is not displayed if you change the file extension from to one that is associated with a Microsoft product. For example, if you change the extension from to , there is no warning. There will be no complaints from Windows because you are taking a neutral document (a plain text file) and associating it with one of Microsoft's applications. Double-clicking on the file that used to be a , but now (through an extension change only) appears to be a file will open the file with Microsoft Word. If you then try to save the file from within Microsoft Word you will get further warnings that something will be lost if you choose to save your document in a format unfamiliar to a Microsoft application.

Clearly there is some advantage to warning users about accidental changes to their files. However, the warnings are not universal, and they are always trying to steer the user away from neutral file types and toward a proprietary and closed file types. Finally we note that this behavior does not occur on the Mozilla browser on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, nor on Internet Explorer or the Safari browser for Macintosh. There is no technical reason why the original file extension cannot be retained when a file is opened in Internet Explorer for Windows.