php page redirect

Question

can php make a redirect call after executing a function? i am creating a function on the completion of which i want it to redirect to a file located in the same root folder. can it be done?

 if {
      //i am using echo here
 }

 else if ($_SESSION['qnum'] > 10) { 
            session_destroy();
            echo "Some error occured.";
            //redirect to user.php
        }

Answer 1

The header() function does this:

header("Location: user.php");

Answer 2

Yes.

In essence, as long as nothing is output, you can do whatever you want (kill a session, remove user cookies, calculate Pi to 'n' digits, etc.) prior to issuing a location header.

Answer 3

Use http_redirect

Answer 4

header( "Location: http://www.domain.com/user.php" );

But you can't first do an echo, and then redirect.

Answer 5

Yes, you would use the header function.

header("Location: http://www.yourwebsite.com/user.php"); /* Redirect browser */
exit();

It is a good practice to call exit() right afterwords so that code below it does not get executed.

Also, from the documentation:

Remember that header() must be called before any actual output is sent, either by normal HTML tags, blank lines in a file, or from PHP. It is a very common error to read code with include(), or require(), functions, or another file access function, and have spaces or empty lines that are output before header() is called. The same problem exists when using a single PHP/HTML file.

This means you should not echo anything right before the header() function, as doing so will more than likely throw an error. Also, you will need to verify that this code gets run before any other output as well.

Answer 6

Using a javascript as a failsafe will ensure the user is redirected (even if the headers have already been sent). Here you go:

//$url should be an absolute url
function redirect($url){
    if (headers_sent()){
      die('<script type="text/javascript">window.location=\'', $url ,'\';</script>');
    }else{
      header('Location: ' . $url);
      die();
    }    
}

If you need to properly handle relative paths, I've written a function for that (but that's outside the scope of the question).

Answer 7

I would probably set the message as a session variable, redirect the user to another page which displays the message and destroy the session.