Reliable header sending mechanism in php 6

Ezra Nugroho wrote:

Can I ask for the following support, at least to begin conversation
about it if it hasn't been done before.

Currently, the header() function still carries the following warning in
its online 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 is quite annoying since this makes header() or setcookie() calls to
be unreliable.

I am aware that it can be done more reliably by turning the output
buffering on. This is less of an issue if you are writing your own
webapp. However, this is much more difficult if a person writes a
library for other people's consumptions. The library cannot enforce
output buffering in the webapp.

Can we please give it a thought in PHP 6? Maybe by turning output
buffering on by default, or even by enforcing output buffering.

In Java, you can get the request object, and the response object of a
web request. I find this very useful and reliable.

Any thoughts or comments about this?

There is nothing unreliable about is as far as I am concerned. You have
full control over output buffering from your script. Forcing people to
buffer output by default will mean higher memory usage and higher
latency for existing scripts with no gain given their code is working today.

In my mind, it is still unreliable...
When I write my library, how can I enforce people who adopt it to enable
ob?

Furthermore, I think it's quite annoying that some functions may not
work just because of an inclusion of a blank space somewhere in a file
that you don't maintain.

As php applications get bigger, and developers have only a small scope
of the big picture, the reliability of the functions becomes bigger and
bigger deal.

http://docs.php.net/manual/en/outcontrol.configuration.php

-Hannes

In my mind, it is still unreliable...
When I write my library, how can I enforce people who adopt it to enable
ob?

Furthermore, I think it's quite annoying that some functions may not
work just because of an inclusion of a blank space somewhere in a file
that you don't maintain.

As php applications get bigger, and developers have only a small scope
of the big picture, the reliability of the functions becomes bigger and
bigger deal.

Enforcing people to use some specific way of coding to use library is
incorrect, anyway. But, you can correctly handle the situation (i.e.
provide a meaningful error to the user) by making a simple check:
http://docs.php.net/headers-sent

--
Alexey Zakhlestin
http://blog.milkfarmsoft.com/