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PHP Headers and Popular Mime Types

By David Walsh on May 7, 2009

Like my Create a Basic Web Service Using PHP, MySQL, XML, and JSON illustrates, even though a file's extension ends in PHP, you can still tell the browser that you're outputting a different content type. Here are a few of the more popular content types used on the internet.

Atom

header('Content-Type: application/atom+xml');

CSS

header('Content-Type: text/css');

Javascript

header('Content-Type: text/javascript');

JPEG Image

header('Content-Type: image/jpeg');

JSON

header('Content-Type: application/json');

PDF

header('Content-Type: application/pdf');

RSS

header('Content-Type: application/rss+xml; charset=ISO-8859-1');

Text (Plain)

header('Content-Type: text/plain');

XML

header('Content-Type: text/xml');

Just because a file ends in .PHP doesn't mean it responds with XHTML -- respond however you'd like!

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Discussion

Bruno Lustosa
Great list of mime types.
Perhaps I’d just be careful about the charset at the RSS example. People could add it blindly and suddenly accented characters would stop working if the rest of the site is using other encodings, like utf-8.
Matěj Grabovský
Interesting list. Nothing new, but still nice. BTW Javascript and XML should be application, text is obsolete.
David Walsh
@Matěj Grabovský: Interesting. Can you share your resource for knowing that?

Prabhatsinh
Thank you for sharing your list
Please check below link complete list of mime types
http://webdesign.about.com/od/multimedia/a/mime-types-by-file-extension.htm
Now, I have only question related to your awesome site.
Question: How your site is working fast? When I click on any link, page loads are very fast and easily.
Will you give me answer?

Matěj Grabovský
@David Walsh: Well, especially Wikipedia, RFCs (concretely RFC3023) and this thing.
David Walsh
Thank you for sharing Matěj!
Matěj Grabovský
You’re welcome, sir!
Eric Wendelin
BTW, It is common to prefix experimental mime types with ‘x-‘ (e.g. application/x-json)
kadimi
Very usefull stuff, I suggest you ad this one too (exe, zip, rar…)
```
header("Content-Type: application/force-download");
```
BTW, 7 comments, since may 7th… and it’s 7 a.m. here in Morocco
Bahia
Thanks a lot for this information.
francis
Content-Type or Content-type ?
Darjiling Tea
Have been using just the java, css and htmls. Will do with the rest later.
Thanks for the list David.
Pleasure reading.
;)
Ares
Perfect list! Just what I was looking for. Thanks, Mr. Walsh :-)
Bhavana
nodeset[0];
$i = $r->new_child(“item”);
$i->new_child(“title”, $head);
$i->new_child(“link”, $link);
$i->new_child(“description”, $comment);

$out = domxml_dumpmem($doc);
$file = $arch . “.xml”;
$f = fopen($file, ‘w’);
fputs($f, $out);
fclose($f);

echo $out;
?>
Max
Really nice, that’s exactly what I was looking for!
Thanks a lot David, for another great tutorial.