work-around headers already sent

[Anon]

Hello. If anyone could help me with this, they would truly be the bomb.

I have a form that submits, then validates, then, if everything checks okay, I redirect to another php page. The form takes some time to validate, and instead of having the user stare at the form for a long time, I want to have a animated gif displaying "processing form".

In order for the redirection to the next page, I used the header("Location: blahblah"); But the in order for the header to be used there cannot be any html outputted before this header. And in my case the animated gif is considered html outputted. I also tried setting the Content-Type to image/gif. But this does not work either. Rather, it displays the animated gif and that's all it does.

Please help. I'm stumped.

-m

[Anon]

I'm sure there's a more elegant way but you could redirect to the gif page and have that redirect to another page that actually processes the script. You can do with with a META tag which is plain HTML.

[Anon]

Thanks for your help. This will probably work, although I don't know right now because I've actually run into another problem with buffering the output. Since the process takes a long time I need to flush the contents (namely the html that says "processing form") before the validation of the form occurs. This is not working for some reason. Please see my "flush" topic posted in a separate thread: 2001-03-07 19:28:32