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
    5 More HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs.  Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers.  Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a...

  • 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...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Text Flipping

    There are lots and lots of useless but fun JavaScript techniques out there. This is another one of them. One popular April Fools joke I quickly got tired of was websites transforming their text upside down. I found a jQuery Plugin by Paul...

  • By
    MooTools Clipboard Plugin

    The ability to place content into a user's clipboard can be extremely convenient for the user. Instead of clicking and dragging down what could be a lengthy document, the user can copy the contents of a specific area by a single click of a mouse.

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!