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Bobby19's avatar
Bobby19
Explorer | Level 4
7 months ago
Solved

Best practice to convert Dropbox shared URL to direct download link in code?

 
  • Greg-DB's avatar
    Greg-DB
    7 months ago

    The dl=1 parameter is meant for downloading a file in a browser, so if you want to programmatically retrieve the file data, you may want to use raw=1 instead of dl=1. I just tried it and raw=1 returned a 'content-type: image/png' (after the redirect), for example.

Greg-DB's avatar
Greg-DB
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
7 months ago

You can find the official documentation for this here: https://help.dropbox.com/share/force-download

In short, the recommendation is not to change the hostname, but to parse the URL (as opposed to doing string replacements) to change the URL parameters as needed, and make sure your client can follow redirects automatically.

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