Question

Does calling header('Location:') without die() after it make sense at all?

If not, why isn’t die() being performed automatically by PHP interpreter? If yes, when?

Answer 1

A good example is explained in this PHP user note, copied here for posterity:

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A simple but useful packaging of arr1’s suggestion for continuing
processing after telling the the browser that output is finished.

I always redirect when a request requires some processing (so we don’t
do it twice on refresh) which makes things easy…

<?php 
 function redirect_and_continue($sURL) 
 { 
  header( "Location: ".$sURL ) ; 
  ob_end_clean(); //arr1s code 
  header("Connection: close"); 
  ignore_user_abort(); 
  ob_start(); 
  header("Content-Length: 0"); 
  ob_end_flush(); 
  flush(); // end arr1s code 
  session_write_close(); // as pointed out by Anonymous 
 } 
?>

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This is useful for tasks that take a long time, such as converting a video or scaling a big image.