How to prevent Warning: POST Content-Length and memory size

Question

Currently when user uploads a photo the page says "Warning: POST Content-Length of XXX bytes exceeds the limit of 21000000 bytes in Unknown on line 0".

I know what that means and I am NOT looking for the solultions like the increasing the max_upload values or even memory_size_limit... Because users may and users will upload terabytes of nonsense even if you explicitly tell them only max 20MB files and only images are allowed.

I am looking for a solution on:

• How to prevent this warning(s) to even happen?
  OR at least:
• How to prevent displaying of this warning(s)?

EDIT: PLEASE READ ! - Please understand that of course I am handling the error/warning after (since line 1) , problem is this happens on a virtual "line 0" that is why I need to hide the error or prevent it to raise - because I cant put any code before the place where the error happens.

EDIT2: Finally after a very long research and digging I got an idea - it worked - see my own answer.

Answer 1

So after searching instead of working today I finally got an idea how to solve this, it worked, and even didnt cause much damage. But please first understand what you are doing, before doing it. :) As I suggested in one of my comments it is really possible to turn off PHP errors in .htacess - just turn off the PHP startup warnings.

Before you apply the solution:

Note that: after you insert this code to your .htaccess you won't be able to see any startup error

Also note that: there are more start up errors on line "0" than this one.

Do before: Before you do this you should prepare your script in the way that it should check the uploaded content size and give user a proper information message. The fact that the warning doesnt show DOES NOT mean that you should do nothing about it. It means the EXACT oposite - you should do all that you can to make something at least near-equal to the warning raise - check, double check if you can, handle error and raise your own error message.

Add this to your .htaccess:

php_flag display_startup_errors off

It is not that evil as it seems to be:

Please note that this turns off startup errors only.
So all the regular PHP errors/warnings/notices stays ON :)

Even XAMPP's PHP "itself" recommends it for production:

The php.ini file literaly says:

; display_startup_errors
;   Default Value: Off
;   Development Value: On
;   Production Value: Off

PS: "startup error" seems to be those errors before PHP script is executed itself - these errors are usually trying to "persuade" you that they are on the line 0.

Thanks to my idea and this answer: How to disable notice and warning in PHP within .htaccess file?

EDIT: As this is a php_flag setting, you can of course also set it by default in your php.ini if you have custom instalation of PHP :)

Answer 2

The question is

How to prevent Warning: POST Content-Length

the answer is, without edit any config value, put this code at the very start of the file that will receive the form to be processed:

 <?php // here start your php file
 ob_get_contents();
 ob_end_clean();

That is. No more warning, as well anything else you do not want as output on your page. After, as suggested elsewhere you can decide what to do with:

if($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'POST' && empty($_POST) && empty($_FILES) && $_SERVER['CONTENT_LENGTH'] > 0){ echo"WoW your file is too big!"; }

Maybe also chunk the file, if in another way you pass correct values about file to be processed by Php.

as explained here Warning: POST Content-Lenght ...