File Download Problem Sites

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
As many people have noticed by now, on a number of websites - ChinesePod, Yahoo Mail, etc - clicking on a download link for a Pleco flashcard list / .txt document file in our built-in web browser doesn't always download it correctly; sometimes (or all the time on some sites) the link will display in the web browser instead.

We don't yet have a really good fix for this on websites that we don't control; downloads do work fine (or we think they do) on PlecoForums, since we've coded them to work that way, but on other sites, the web browser quietly treats the file as HTML without even telling us, and the only way we could detect that the file that it downloaded is a .txt or .xml file is to download it ourselves separately in the background (obviously a bad idea on a bandwidth- and memory-constrained mobile device). So for the time being, our plan is to code in a specific list of website download links and automatically download instead of loading any URL we see from them.

The upshot of all of this is that we need to build a list of websites to check for / make sure Pleco downloads files correctly from. Thus far we've got all five of the sites linked from our default "Flashcard Lists" page (HSK Flashcards, ChinesePod, Popup Chinese, Shengci, ZDT) downloading correctly for 2.1.1, along with Gmail and Yahoo Mail attachments (Hotmail unfortunately doesn't seem to allow attachment downloads at all from their mobile web client), but if there's any other site you use to download Pleco flashcard lists or document files that doesn't currently work correctly, we'd really appreciate it if you'd let us know about it so we can make sure it works too.

TL;DR: if you can't download text / XML files in Pleco from a particular website, post the name of that site here.

Thanks!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Similar, yes; we fixed it on most sites simply by checking for / auto-downloading anything with an appropriate file extension, but with dynamically-generated lists / attachment downloads / etc the extension doesn't always match the actual file, and the slightly non-standard nature of file downloads on iPhone means that websites not specifically tested with our software don't always force a download in those cases.
 

yong_li

Member
Hi,

am I the only one still having problems to download from chinesepod? the download is starting, I can choose the folder, the file is created, but the file is useless. I can't import any vocabulary using these files.

Am I doing it wrong or has this issue still to be fixed?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It looks like there's a new issue there, actually - Pleco's detecting that it should download the file correctly, but CP seems to be thinking that none of your card lists are actually selected to export. We should be able to fix this for the next update - in the meantime, the best bet is probably just to upload them from a desktop.
 
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