Question

I’m creating a JSON string from the results of a mySQL query in PHP. But for some reason the PHP “header” function isn’t appending anything when I save the results to a file for sanity checks. Below is the code:

        header("Content-Type: application/json");

    if(mysql_num_rows($result)){
            $dataResults = '{"Data":[';
            $first = true;
            $row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);

            while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)){
                    if($first) {
                            $first = false;
                    } else {
                            $dataResults = $dataResults . ',';
                    }
                    $dataResults = $dataResults . json_encode($row);
            }
            $dataResults = $dataResults . ']}';
    } else {
            $dataResults = '[]';
    }

    file_put_contents('/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/PHP/results.json', $dataResults);

The output looks o.k., except it is missing the “Content-Type: application/json”. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Why would header() write anything to the file?

header() sets response header information using the response hook in mod_php or whatever the CGI equivalent is if using CGI.

Text files do not contain any meta information other than their encoding (if that).