Currently in my PHP scripts, I redirect the user to a custom 404 not found error page when he/she tries to access content that doesn't exist or doesn't belong to that user. Like so:
header('Location: http://www.mydomain.com/error/notfound/');
exit;
I realize the above header() call sends a 302 redirect status code by default.
What I don't understand, however, is when I should send the 404 not found status code. Before I redirect the user? Or when I display the /error/notfound/ page?
Thanks for your help!
You should do something like this:
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
include 'error.php';
die();
You don't execute 404 errors as a redirect at all.
What you really want to do is send the 404 status header, and then replace the current output with the body of a 404 page.
There are various ways to do this and it depends quite a bit on how your site is structured. MVC applications typically hand this with a forward. I've seen other systems that throw an Exception and then the registered exception handler takes care of displaying the 404 page.
At any rate, the rough steps are
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