sessions throwing out the page

DP23

hey guys,

i understand you must always start a session (for cookies) before the HTML tags - BUT its throwing out my whole page. ie - my form was nicely centered now its skewed to the left

please advise how to rectify this

here is the opening code

<?php 
//check for required fields from the form 
if (!isset($_POST[username]) || !isset($_POST[password])) { 
    header("Location: login.html"); 
    exit; 
} 

//connect to server and select database 

DEFINE (DB_USER, ""); 
DEFINE (DB_PASSWORD, ""); 
DEFINE (DB_HOST, "localhost"); 
DEFINE (DB_TEST, "test"); 

$conn = mysql_connect ('localhost', '','') or die ('could not connect to MYSQL because: ' . mysql_error()); 

mysql_select_db (blueprintdb) or die ('could not select the DB because: ' . mysql_error()); 


//create and issue the query 
$sql = "select first_name, last_name from users where username = '$_POST[username]' AND password = '$_POST[password]'"; 
$result = mysql_query($sql,$conn) or die("User Query Error ".mysql_error()); 

//get the number of rows in the result set; should be 1 if a match 
if (mysql_num_rows($result) == 1) { 
   //if authorized, get the values of f_name l_name 
   $first_name = mysql_result($result, 0, 'first_name'); 
   $last_name = mysql_result($result, 0, 'last_name'); 

   //set authorization cookie 
   setcookie("auth", "1", 0, "/", "questionnaireproject.com", 0); 
  print "Cookie status: authorised-".$_COOKIE[auth]; 

   //prepare message for printing, and user menu 
   $msg = "Welcome to Dynamic Homes $first_name!"; 
   $msg .= "Authorised Users Menu:"; 
   $msg .= "<ul><li><a href=\"index.html\">Return to Home Page</a></ul>"; 
} else 
  { 
   //redirect back to login form if not authorised 
   header("Location: wrong.html"); 
//print "Wrong user name or password. Please try login again</a>"; 
   exit; 
} 
?> 

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> 


<head>

Rodney_H_

Starting a Session or running a PHP script prior to outputting any HTML will not throw off the layout of a page. There must be some other explanation for why your form is not centered.

Look in your HTML markup.

What you may want to do is run the script and save the value that you will print out into a variable. THEN, if you are not redirecting the user, print out the opening <html> and <body> tags, etc, and then have PHP output the message in the page where you want it....

So, this line:

print "Cookie status: authorised-".$_COOKIE[auth];

Could be:

$message = "Cookie status: authorised-".$_COOKIE[auth];

Then, obviously, in your page, wherever you want to display that message, you can have:

print $message;

<sidenote>
Also, as a side-note, when you use non-numerical array keys, it is best to put them in quotes, unless they are constants or variables.

So, this: $_POST[username]

Is best written as: $POST["username"] or $POST['username'] (single or double quotes, whatever your preference...)
</sidenote>