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".
}

Solution 1

Yes, you would use the header function.

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

It is a good practice to call exit() right after it 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.

Solution 2

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).

Solution 3

Simple way is to use:

  echo '<script>window.location.href = "the-target-page.php";</script>';

Solution 4

   $url='the/url/you/want/to/go';
   echo '<META HTTP-EQUIV=REFRESH CONTENT="1; '.$url.'">';

this works for me fine.

Solution 5

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

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

View more solutions

Comments

[user1972007]

I serach about this and i find related this answer in stackoverflow.com/questions/13539752/redirect-function/13539‌​808

[Gumbo]

Please use absolute URLs according to the HTTP specification.

[stefando]

True, but make sure you remove the echo first or you might experience a "Headers allready send" ;)

[brianreavis]

how descriptive.

[Allain Lalonde]

You should also set the HTTP Status to 302.

[Gabe]

Change this line to this and it will... die('<script type="text/javascript">window.location=\''.$url.'\';</script‌​>');

[colithium]

"The second special case is the "Location:" header. Not only does it send this header back to the browser, but it also returns a REDIRECT (302) status code to the browser unless the 201 or a 3xx status code has already been set."

[Nitzan Wilnai]

The above function with Gabe's fix works!

[Liza]

this works for me too. Thanks

[Gellie Ann]

I'm bothered by "afterwords".

[Naveed Ahmad]

Worked for me as well

[SteveCinq]

Yep, this was a life-saver for me; I dynamically populate page titles and body ids from a header include so no matter what, I was always going to have sent headers. And for me this is just a web form bot response. Nice one, thanks.

[Prabal Thakur]

this worked for me too. :) don't know why this is not at the top. :(

[RozzA]

fine unless user has JS disabled.

[Sam Denty]

In which case you could use a meta redirect die('<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=' . $url . '" />');

[Akash M]

this worked for me also. Thank you.

[Pete]

Use die instead of exit to prevent only exiting the function.