Location: - Forcing the Browser to Redirect to Another URL

This section provides a tutorial example on how to insert the 'Location:' header line in a HTTP response to tell the browser to do a URL redirect - Send a HTTP request to the specified ULR immediately.

The PHP manual document says we can use header("Location: ...") to tell the browser to make a new HTTP request to a given URL. This is called "redirect". Here is my testing script, HttpRedirect.php:

<?php 
#  HttpRedirect.php
#- Copyright (c) 2003-2019, HerongYang.com, All Rights Reserved.
#
   $text = "<html><body>Moved!</body></html>";
   print($text);
   header("Content-Type: text/xml;charset=utf-8");
   header("Content-Length: ".strlen($text));
   header("Location: http://www.herongyang.com/");
?>

The output from Apache 2.4 and PHP 7:

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2019 22:47:11 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.37 (Win64)
X-Powered-By: PHP/7.3.0
Content-Length: 32
Location: http://www.herongyang.com/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/xml;charset=utf-8

<html><body>Moved!</body></html>

The output from IIS and PHP 5:

HTTP/1.1 302 Object Moved
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.1
Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2005 03:46:58 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.4
Content-Length: 32
Location: http://www.herongyang.com/

<head><title>Document Moved</title></head>
<body><h1>Object Moved</h1>This document may be
 found <a HREF="http://www.herongyang.com/">here</a></body>

I am a little bit surprised by the output:

Last update: 2019.

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 Introduction and Installation of PHP 7.3

 PHP Script File Syntax

 PHP Data Types and Data Literals

 Variables, References, and Constants

 Expressions, Operations and Type Conversions

 Conditional Statements - "if" and "switch"

 Loop Statements - "while", "for", and "do ... while"

 Function Declaration, Arguments, and Return Values

 Arrays - Ordered Maps

 Introduction of Class and Object

 Integrating PHP with Apache Web Server

 Retrieving Information from HTTP Requests

 Creating and Managing Sessions in PHP Scripts

 Sending and Receiving Cookies in PHP Scripts

Controlling HTTP Response Header Lines in PHP Scripts

 What Is an HTTP Response

 HTTP Response Header Lines

 header() - Inserting a Raw Header Lines

 HttpRequestGet.php - Viewing Header Lines

 Response Header Lines of Static Files

 HttpHeaderLines.php - Examples of Inserting Header Lines

Location: - Forcing the Browser to Redirect to Another URL

 Content-Type: - Generating Non-HTML Response Body

 Content-Disposition: - Sending Files for Downloading

 MySQL Server Connection and Access Functions

 Functions to Manage Directories, Files and Images

 SOAP Extension Function and Calling Web Services

 SOAP Server Functions and Examples

 Localization Overview of Web Applications

 Using Non-ASCII Characters in HTML Documents

 Using Non-ASCII Characters as PHP Script String Literals

 Receiving Non-ASCII Characters from Input Forms

 "mbstring" Extension and Non-ASCII Encoding Management

 Managing Non-ASCII Character Strings with MySQL Servers

 Configuring and Sending out Emails

 Outdated Tutorials

 References

 Full Version in PDF/EPUB