Referring URL

Skull

I'm having a bit of a problem setting the referring url in a page's header information. The reason for attempting this is because I have a page with links to external sites in it. The websites themselves aren't displayed but instead a "tracker" url on my domain that tracks any outbound clicks is displayed.

Now, I assumed that the "tracker" url would be the one to show up as the websites referring url, but it is not, it is the referer to the tracker url, or if it is a direct hit, just no referrering url at all.

I've tried setting headers for Referer on the tracker url page before sending the user to the website

header("Referer: http://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
header("Location: http://".$site);

but thats just not working for me. Could anyone explain why this is happening and point me in the direction of an alternative solution?

Thanks in advance

MarkR

Referer is not a valid header to be set on the RESPONSE.

HTTP has two types of header - request and response. In some cases the same header exists in both and does a similar job, but in most cases they're completely independent.

The "Referer" (note the spelling error) header is a request header. You can't set it by setting a response header. The only one which works like that is cookies, because that's how they're supposed to work.

Referer is set up entirely by the browser and it does as it pleases, either setting it to the previous page, the previous URL even if it was a redirect, something entirely ficticious, or nothing at all. Also, proxies may strip it (and some firewall hardware / software does too).

Mark

Skull

Right I see, its just i'm certain I read somewhere that what I'm trying to do could be accomplished by Pear's HTML_Response class, and since I don't have pear installed on my server, I assumed there must be another way around it.

I am aware that some firewalls/proxies will block it, but for the users that don't have software that does this I thought I mayaswell try and get it set up to work as I intend with them.