Question

I use .htaccess RewriteRules to pass the url to index.php. If the specified page name isn’t found in the database, I want my script to throw proper 404 responses.

The way I have tried to achieve this is:

header($_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"] . " 404 Not Found");

Analysing the HTTP responses in my browser, the response comes back fine:

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found 

However, I would like to be able to output a friendly 404 page, but anything after the header() function gets disregarded, and anything before … well … that’d be stupid.

Can anyone suggest how to output a 404 error message from the script?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You have to make sure the output (or ErrorDocument) is larger than 512 bytes as to make sure Internet Explorer doesn’t display it’s own error-page. This is probably why you have experienced any output after the header doesn’t get displayed.