[RESOLVED] session_start killing the output

StevenJ

Hi,

I have a user login system, and this system relies on sessions to display different elements of a page, depending on who has logged in and what level they are to view (ie - admin or client).

I had forgotten to put the start_session() in a few pages, so have just gone back to do this, and there is one page in particular that is causing me a problem. I don't know If I have forgotten some basic rule, but it has me stumped........

this page workes

root/index.php

	require_once ("inc/img_functions.php") ;
	require_once ("inc/blog_functions.php") ;
	require_once ("inc/inc.php") ;
	require_once ("Connections/photogallery.php") ;
	//initialize the session
	if (!isset($_SESSION)) {
	  session_start();
	}

but this page DOES NOT, as soon as the session_start() code is reached, page output stops..............if I comment it out, it works again..........

root/blog/index.php

	require_once ("../inc/blog_functions.php") ;
	require_once ("../inc/inc.php") ;
	require_once ("../Connections/photogallery.php") ;
	//initialize the session
	if (!isset($_SESSION)) {
	  session_start();
	}

any ideas?

planetsim

Try putting session_start at the very top of the file. Im guessing one of the require's is outputting headers or HTML to the browser before calling session_start.

StevenJ

would you believe I actually tried that, but it didn't work. However, so I could say as much, I did it again, moving the call to the top of the page, and it works now!

doh! user error.

that said, it usually warns you that headers have been output - I never got any warning or error. that would have made it easy!

For anyone else having session errors and found this thread through searching, there must be no output sent to the browser before a session can be started.

many thanks

Steven

Weedpacket

StevenJ wrote:
that said, it usually warns you that headers have been output - I never got any warning or error. that would have made it easy!

On a live site, display_errors should be turned off; perhaps that is the case here. log_errors should therefore be turned on and the error message would have been written that way. The other possibility is that error_reporting has been turned so far down that it doesn't output Warnings.