header('HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found'); not doing anything

Question

I have a 404.php file in my site's main directory and I was using header('Location: 404.php'); for a while until someone said that you should use header('HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found'); instead. So I replaced it with that and then added: ErrorDocument 404 /404.php to my apache config file and restarted the server but it doesn't work.

I tried different variations including ErrorDocument 404 404.php and ErrorDocument 404 mywebite/404.php but to no avail.

What I mean by doesn't work is that earlier when using header('Location: 404.php'); it would redirect to the 404.php file but when I replace it with header('HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found'); it seems to just skip over the line and not do anything. It most certainly is not redirecting. The reason I am calling for the redirect is because if a $_GET header value is not recognized the page should 404.

Answer 1

No, it probably is actually working. It's just not readily visible. Instead of just using the header call, try doing that, then including 404.php, and then calling die.

You can test the fact that the HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found works by creating a PHP file named, say, test.php with this content:

<?php

header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
echo "PHP continues.\n";
die();
echo "Not after a die, however.\n";

Then viewing the result with curl -D /dev/stdout reveals:

HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found
Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2011 03:39:06 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.2
Content-Length: 14
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

PHP continues.