PHP Headers and Popular Mime Types

By  on  

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!

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS Filters

    CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a NoScript Compatible Select Form Element with an onChange Event

    I wouldn't say that I'm addicted to checking Google Analytics but I do check my statistics often. I guess hoping for a huge burst of traffic from some unknown source. Anyway, I have multiple sites set up within my account. The way to...

  • By
    jQuery Wookmark

    The first thing that hits you when you visit Pinterest is "Whoa, the columns are the same width and the photos are cut to fit just the way they should."  Basic web users probably think nothing of it but as a developer, I can appreciate the...

Discussion

  1. 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.

  2. Interesting list. Nothing new, but still nice. BTW Javascript and XML should be application, text is obsolete.

  3. @Matěj Grabovský: Interesting. Can you share your resource for knowing that?

  4. @David Walsh: Well, especially Wikipedia, RFCs (concretely RFC3023) and this thing.

  5. Thank you for sharing Matěj!

  6. You’re welcome, sir!

  7. BTW, It is common to prefix experimental mime types with ‘x-‘ (e.g. application/x-json)

  8. 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

  9. Thanks a lot for this information.

  10. Content-Type or Content-type ?

  11. Have been using just the java, css and htmls. Will do with the rest later.
    Thanks for the list David.
    Pleasure reading.
    ;)

  12. Perfect list! Just what I was looking for. Thanks, Mr. Walsh :-)

  13. 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;
    ?>

  14. Really nice, that’s exactly what I was looking for!
    Thanks a lot David, for another great tutorial.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!