note 68418 deleted from function.session-start by peehaa

Note Submitter: devonmitton at gmail dot com ---- I ran into the problem of losing the session after i redirect the user with header( location:); I found that the problem doesn't occur in php5. Atleast for myself. I tested it on IIS as well as Apache and both times using php5 fixed the issue. Secondly, I found a weird solution: The website i'm building required Cyrillic type, so i encode the pages using UTF-8. The problem that happens is that UTF-8 sends information before the php tags, and therefore before the session_start(); which ultimately renders the session_start(); call ineffective. The UTF-8 encoding sends a small chunk of information before anything. This is called BOM (byte order marks). To ensure that they don't show up, you need to save your files with a UTF-8 encoding which bypasses BOM. BBEdit for the Macintosh with allow for this under the file encoding options. To recap: In this instance and for my situation, UTF-8, no BOM will allow sessions to pass through the header( location:); redirect, or using PHP5. Hope this helps someone! [i will also repeat this comment under the header() function]