Redirecting to another URL

You can use the header() function to instruct the browser to redirect to a different URL:

$url = 'https://example.org/foo/bar';
if (!headers_sent()) { // check headers - you can not send headers if they already sent
  header('Location: ' . $url);
  exit; // protects from code being executed after redirect request
} else {
  throw new Exception('Cannot redirect, headers already sent');
}

You can also redirect to a relative URL (this is not part of the official HTTP specification, but it does work in all browsers):

$url = 'foo/bar';
if (!headers_sent()) {
  header('Location: ' . $url);
  exit;
} else {
  throw new Exception('Cannot redirect, headers already sent');
}

If headers have been sent, you can alternatively send a meta refresh HTML tag.

WARNING: The meta refresh tag relies on HTML being properly processed by the client, and some will not do this. In general, it only works in web browsers. Also, consider that if headers have been sent, you may have a bug and this should trigger an exception.

You may also print a link for users to click, for clients that ignore the meta refresh tag:

$url = 'https://example.org/foo/bar';
if (!headers_sent()) {
  header('Location: ' . $url);
} else {
  $saveUrl = htmlspecialchars($url); // protects from browser seeing url as HTML
  // tells browser to redirect page to $saveUrl after 0 seconds
  print '<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=' . $saveUrl . '">';
  // shows link for user
  print '<p>Please continue to <a href="' . $saveUrl . '">' . $saveUrl . '</a></p>';
}
exit;

Found a mistake? Have a question or improvement idea? Let me know.

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