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PHP Programming

PHP Function Of The Day: ob_end_clean()

Sometimes you get in to a situation where you are working in an environment that drops everything into an output buffer before it spits it out the browser. In most languages this is called “output buffering”. The problem with having EVERYTHING buffered is being able to do special stuff like dynamic XML documents.

My solution to this little pickle was to just drop everything from the current output buffer and then kill the process after I’m done with it. To do this, just execute “ob_end_clean()” right before the functions/objects/code you need to execute. What “ob_end_clean()” does is drops all information that is currently stored in the output buffer, and then stops the buffering anything after it.

One “gotch ya” moment I had using this function was that it doesn’t end ALL cases of output buffering. If for some strange reason there is nested buffering going on, you’ll need to call the function as many times as it takes to get to the top of the call stack.

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.ob-end-clean.php

By Jack Slingerland

Founder of Kernl.us. Working and living in Raleigh, NC. I manage teams of software engineers and work in Python, Django, TypeScript, Node.js, React+Redux, Angular, and PHP. I enjoy hanging out with my wife and kids, lifting weights, and PC gaming in my free time.