Question

I was wondering if there are any problems or difference between sending normal headers before or after sending cookie headers. Do some browsers prefer a certain order to headers? If the cookie header is to large would subsequent headers never be parsed?

setcookie("TestCookie", $value);
header("Content-type: text/javascript");

or

header('Location: http://www.example.com/');
setcookie("TestCookie", $value);

or

setcookie("SuperLargeCookie", $massive_value);
setcookie("TinyCookie", $small_value);
header("Status: 404 Not Found");

Answer 1

There is no difference. The Http protocol does not specify that headers are to be in a certain order. Browsers do not differentiate based on the order of headers either.

The total length of Http headers does have a limit. This limit is imposed by the server and not the browser. Typically between 8K and 16K. However this is configurable.