Re: trouble with headers

On Tue, 2002-02-12 at 17:57, Erik Price wrote: > Sorry, I debugged it myself. > > Don't add extra whitespace lines after you jump out of PHP mode (for > instance, at the end of an include file, don't have any extra lines > after the '?> PHP-jump-out mark'. The extra lines at the bottom of the > functions include file was being interpreted as the end of the headers. > (Man that book on HTTP I was reading at the library came in handy! Perl > Web Client Programming or something) > > It isn't truly HTML since it isn't between the <html> and </html> tags, > but it gets sent along as blank lines in the HTML document. > > That's my theory , anyway. > > > Erik You're right, but just a slight clarification: Well, PHP isn't an HTML parser and has no concept of a DOM, or the SGML-based nature of HTML, or anything like that (although there are extensions which do this). Essentially, PHP generates a series of bytes, which are output. In a web environment, this obviously means 'sent to the browser', and typically implies HTML output. But you can also output WML, csv, LDIF, or any other text-based format; or, for that matter, binary data such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, or whatever. This means that PHP is *required* to output whatever it is asked to--regardless of whether it might look like HTML or not. Hope this explains it, Torben -- Torben Wilson <torben@php.net> http://www.thebuttlesschaps.com http://www.hybrid17.com http://www.inflatableeye.com +1.604.709.0506