Question

Many thanks in advance for even attempting to present a solution.
I’m having trouble with a simple html contact form.
The form’s method is set to post and it’s action is sent to a php file.
At the end of the PHP file the form is sent to, there is a basic location:redirection.

ex) header("Location: ../index.htm");

I configured my php.ini file (Apache) to display the php error(s).
This is what I’m shown:

"Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home2/jwarddes/public_html/newTest/php/contact.php:2) in /home2/jwarddes/public_html/newTest/php/contact.php on line 20"

Line 20 of my code is my header("location:... redirect. This appears to be fine, yet something keeps throwing an error.
Needless to say, I’m stumped.

Could someone please try their hand at a solution or kindly nudge me in the right direction?

Thanks!

Answer 1

that is a common problem.

make sure you do not have any output (even a simple space at the top of the page) as that will send the headers prior to your redirect.

Possible Solutions are the following.

ob_start();

in the top of your page and

ob_end_flush(); 

at the bottom might solve your issue.

Also, I have this special function below which do a very smart redirect, try it out and let me know 🙂

/**
 * redirect()
 * 
 * Attempts to redirect the user to another page.
 * It tries to PHP header redirect, then JavaScript redirect, then try http redirect.
 * The following redirection method is only attempted if the previous redirection method attempt has failed  
 *  
 * @param mixed $url To be redirected to
 * @return nothing
 */
function redirect($url)
{
        if (!headers_sent())
        { //If headers not sent yet... then do php redirect
                header('Location: ' . $url);
                exit;
        } else
        { //If headers are sent... do java redirect... if java disabled, do html redirect.
                echo '<script type="text/javascript">';
                echo 'window.location.href="' . $url . '";';
                echo '</script>';
                echo '<noscript>';
                echo '<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=' . $url . '" />';
                echo '</noscript>';
                exit;
        }
} //==== End -- Redirect