404 Header - Mod ReWrite

[webmasternovis]

Hi all,

I'm trying to use a 404 header, but nothing occurs. I simply use the header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found") code, yet the page just displays as normal.

The problem seems to be because I'm using mod rewrite. My .htaccess file makes certain URLs go to different files. For example mysite.com/directory/AL.php would use the state.php file.

Does anyone know how I could use 404 headers in this situation? At the moment I'm trying to add them in state.php etc on certain if conditions.

Hopefully you'll understand what I mean, it's hard to explain 🙂

Thanks,
Mike

[dagon]

you can send the 404 (or a number of others) header on any page, and yes it will display as normal to the user, after all 404 pages that say "i'm not here" display and they issue the 404 header; what are you actually trying to archive?

[webmasternovis]

On one of my pages I want to show a 404 page if a certain condition occurs. I don't understand what you're saying?

Mike

[jmack159]

i have seen a site before where i encountered a 404, but the site header, like the site nav, and styling are the same as the rest of the site, but the standard 404 message still displays as the body of the page/content. not really sure how it was done, but is this what you were trying to achieve?

[NogDog]

Any possibility the header is not actually being sent, such as in a case where output has already been generated, thus sending headers before your header() call? To verify, you might want to ensure all warnings are being displayed:

<?php
ini_set('display_errors', 1);
error_reporting(E_ALL);

[dagon]

webmasternovis wrote:

On one of my pages I want to show a 404 page if a certain condition occurs. I don't understand what you're saying?

Mike

so

if(foo){
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
}else{
whatever
}

or

if(foo){
header("Location: your 404 page");
}else{
whatever
}

[NogDog]

I'm thinking maybe you should do both: send the 404 header then redirect to the 404 page (since once you get to your PHP code you're past the point where the webserver would do the redirect for a "not found" URL):

<?php
if($notSupposedToBeHere)
{
   header('HTML/1.0 404 Not Found');
   header('Location: http://www.yoursite.com/four04.html');
   exit;
}
// rest of page....
?>

[dagon]

make sure the http://www.yoursite.com/four04.html issues a 404 as Location returns a 302 which will overwrite the 404 in the above example.