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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    JavaScript Canvas Image Conversion

    At last week's Mozilla WebDev Offsite, we all spent half of the last day hacking on our future Mozilla Marketplace app. One mobile app that recently got a lot of attention was Instagram, which sold to Facebook for the bat shit crazy price of one...

  • By
    Display Images as Grayscale with CSS Filters

    CSS filters aren't yet widely supported but they are indeed impressive and a modern need for web imagery.  CSS filters allow you to modify the display of images in a variety of ways, one of those ways being displaying images as grayscale. Doing so requires 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!