Question

Basically I am working on a review form in which users fill out items about a specific product and when submitting the form it calls process.php which validates the form and will email me when one is submitted without error. It then returns the user to the form page and either display the errors that were committed or says it was submitted successfully, this all works great but what I need to do now is when the form is filled out correctly I still want the email and to be returned to the form’s page, but also insert data to my db. My form’s validation works great until I try and pop some code in to insert into the database and then I get these errors…

Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /home/XZXZ/support/database.inc:16) in /home/XZXZ/public_html/Reviews/process.php on line 113

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/XZXZ/support/database.inc:16) in /home/XZXZ/public_html/Reviews/process.php on line 117

I just need to know where I can pop this in at to avoid these errors and still have everything work okay. Here is a look at the process.php file:

<?php

    if( isset($_POST) ){  

        //form validation vars  
        $formok = true;  
        $errors = array();  

        //sumbission data  
        $ipaddress = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];  
        $sub_date = date('d/m/Y');  
        $sub_time = date('H:i:s');  

        //form data
        $sub_date = $_POST['sub_date'];  
        $sub_time = $_POST['sub_time'];  
        $review_title = $_POST['review_title'];
        $rating = $_POST['rating'];
        $pros = $_POST['pros'];  
        $cons = $_POST['cons'];  
        $best_uses = $_POST['best_uses'];  
        $comments = $_POST['comments'];
        $upload = $_POST['upload']; 
        $recommend = $_POST['recommend'];
        $reviewer_name = $_POST['reviewer_name'];
        $reviewer_desc = $_POST['reviewer_desc'];
        $reviewer_loc = $_POST['reviewer_loc'];



        //form validation to go here....  

    }  

        //validate review title is not empty  
    if(empty($review_title)){  
        $formok = false;  
        $errors[] = "You have not entered a title for this review";  
    }

        //validate rating is selected  
    if (isset ($_POST['rating']) && ($_POST['rating'] == '' )) {
        $formok = FALSE;
        $errors[] = "You have not selected a rating for the product";
    } 

        //validate pros is not empty  
    if(empty($pros)){  
        $formok = false;  
        $errors[] = "You have not entered any pros";   
    }

        //validate cons is not empty  
    if(empty($cons)){  
        $formok = false;  
        $errors[] = "You have not entered any cons";  
    }

        //validate name is not empty  
    if(empty($reviewer_name)){  
        $formok = false;  
        $errors[] = "You have not entered your name";  
    }

        //validate desc is not empty  
    if(empty($reviewer_desc)){  
        $formok = false;  
        $errors[] = "You have not entered your description";  
    }

        //validate location is not empty  
    if(empty($reviewer_loc)){  
        $formok = false;  
        $errors[] = "You have not entered your location";  
    } 

        //send email if all is ok  
    if($formok){  

        $headers = "From: [e-mail]" . "\r\n";  
        $headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";  

        $emailbody = "<p>You have received a new product review pending approval from XZXZ.com</p> 
                      <p><strong>Review Title: </strong> {$review_title} </p>
                      <p><strong>Rating: </strong> {rating} </p>
                      <p><strong>Pros: </strong> {$pros} </p> 
                      <p><strong>Cons: </strong> {$cons} </p> 
                      <p><strong>Best Uses: </strong> {$best_uses} </p> 
                      <p><strong>Comments: </strong> {$comments} </p>
                      <p><strong>Upload: </strong> {$upload} </p> 
                      <p><strong>Recommend: </strong> {$recommend} </p>
                      <p><strong>Name: </strong> {$reviewer_name} </p>
                      <p><strong>Description: </strong> {$reviewer_desc} </p> 
                      <p><strong>Location: </strong> {$reviewer_loc} </p>
                      <p>This message was sent from the IP Address: {$ipaddress} on {$date} at {$time}</p>";  

        mail("[e-mail]","New Pending Review",$emailbody,$headers);

        //insert to database    

        require("/home/XZXZ/support/database.inc");

        $SQL="INSERT INTO 'XZXZ_rvs'.'reviews_prod' (sub_date, sub_time, review_title, rating, pros, cons, best_uses, comments, upload, recommend, reviewer_name, reviewer_desc, reviewer_loc) VALUES ('$_POST[$sub_date]','$_POST[$sub_time]','$_POST[$review_title]','$_POST[$rating]','$_POST[$pros]','$_POST[$cons]','$_POST[$best_uses]','$_POST[$comments]','$_POST[$upload]','$_POST[$recommend]','$_POST[$reviewer_name]','$_POST[$reviewer_desc]','$_POST[$reviewer_loc]')";

    }
        //what we need to return back to our form  
    $returndata = array(  
        'posted_form_data' => array(  
            'review_title' => $review_title,
            'rating' => $rating, 
            'pros' => $pros,  
            'cons' => $cons,  
            'best_uses' => $best_uses,  
            'comments' => $comments,
            'upload' => $upload,
            'recommend' => $recommend,
            'reviewer_name' => $reviewer_name,  
            'reviewer_desc' => $reviewer_desc,
            'reviewer_loc' => $reviewer_loc  
        ),  
        'form_ok' => $formok,  
        'errors' => $errors  
    );
    //if this is not an ajax request  
if(empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) && strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) !== 'xmlhttprequest'){  

    //set session variables  
    session_start();  
    $_SESSION['cf_returndata'] = $returndata;  

    //redirect back to form  
    header('location: ' . $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);  

} 

Answer 1

You must add the script before anything is sent to the browser including blank lines or spaces. This could happen on accident if you close your PHP script files (?>) that are included before this script, and your editor, FTP client, or another application adds a blank line to the end of the file (which is common). To prevent this from happening, simply leave PHP scripts open-ended (leave out ?> if the entire file is PHP). It’s also possible that a stray echo (or similar, e.g. print, print_var, etc) is causing the issue.

In your warnings, it looks like this is happening in /home/XZXZ/support/database.inc on line 16.

Also, as touched on Saurabh, you must put die(); after every header("Location: ..."); as the header() function does not redirect the user–it only sends Location: ... as a header to the browser, and leaves it up to the browser to do the rest–the server, however, has no idea you’re redirecting the user, so it will continue to run the script. Therefore, you must kill the script to prevent any additional code from executing.