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phpjavascripthttp-redirectheadermeta

What's a good way to refresh a page with PHP?

This seems like it should be simple enough but I'm having a little trouble.

I have an index page which is both the login page and the main content page, depending on whether or not a session variable is set.

I've tried using JavaScript which is echoed from PHP to handle redirects but it looked sloppy and takes a little bit of time, so I switched to using header("location: abc.php"). The problem with using that for the index page is that it doesn't work after output is sent. I've also tried using a meta tag to refresh the page but that doesn't work in all browsers.

What's the best way to handle this situation?

Thanks in advance.

Solution

  • You can use any of them. However, header("location: abc.php") will not work after sending response! The work around is simple. Use output buffering. 

    <?php
ob_start()

//here goes many lines of your wonderful php code blocks

//now send the header based on your logic
header("location: abc.php")

ob_end_flush()

    Please check the official docs for more info

    Update: You can consider the suggestion of @zerkms. If you really need to silently redirect to other page, do that before sending any outputs using header() function. However, if you want to show that you are redirecting him/her, you can use javascript as you were using! For the latter, you can also use Meta Refresh

    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;URL='http://example.com/'">

    ob_start() will be helpful for this. Because, you will probably show many things on the page and then tell that he/she will be redirected momentarily. The above example will redirect user to example.com in 5 seconds.