exit and ob_*

Hi. This is weird. Here's my structure. I have an index.php file that just includes the content depending on what page the user is on. So, because of potential redirection from those sub-pages, I call ob_start() before any output (in index.php). I'm doing some testing and I'm wanting to see what information's in a variable, etc. So, I display the variable contents and call 'exit' so that the page doesn't continue and get redirected elsewhere. However, when I call 'exit' on one of these sub-pages, I get no output from that sub-page. During testing, I took out the redirection and commented the exit line. The output displayed. Before commenting the exit function call, I called ob_clean to see if it had something to do with there being content in the buffer - the content of the sub-page showed WITH the exit. Why would no information show when calling exit(), even if ob_start had been called? I've never had to deal with this before. [examples] // This is content from a sub-page called from index.php [example code: does not work] echo 'hi'; exit; // 'hi' does NOT display ... [example code: does work] ob_clean(); echo 'hi'; exit; // 'hi' DOES display ... [/examples] I suppose this isn't a big deal during production, but during testing it's really frustrating. Does anyone have any suggestions as to why 'exit' is functioning (no pun intended) this way? Note: I do want what's currently in the buffer to be sent to the browser, so I don't want to have to call ob_clean. Any thoughts? Another person (*francois at bonzon dot com) *mentions this on the PHP exit page <http://www.php.net/exit>, but I'm still not sure why it happens. Thanks in advance, ~Philip