Posted by Chris Shiflett on 09/02/05 20:01

Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
> That's a bit misleading. The HTTP response headers are sent a soon
> as you output something from your script (calling header() or
> setcookie() doesn't count as output, so you can set all the headers
> and cookies you want).

They're sent to Apache, but that doesn't mean anything is necessarily
sent to the client, right? I guess I should have pointed out that this
depends on a few things, such as whether the response is sent with:

Transfer-Encoding: chunked

or

Content-Length: ...

Common sense tells me that Apache can't provide a reliable
Content-Length header until my script completes. :-)

> And the browsers tend to redirect right away once they get this
> header.

I would find that very surprising. Maybe I'll experiment. If I
understand you correctly, you're suggesting that a browser will request
the new URL before receiving the previous response in its entirety. Even
assuming a chunked transfer encoding, that seems weird.

Chris

--
Chris Shiflett
Brain Bulb, The PHP Consultancy
http://brainbulb.com/

[Back to original message]