What is output buffering?

Question

What is output buffering and why is one using it in PHP?

Answer 1

Output buffering is used by PHP to improve performance and to perform a few tricks.

• You can have PHP store all output into a buffer and output all of it at once improving network performance.

• You can access the buffer content without sending it back to browser in certain situations.

Consider this example:

The above example captures the output into a variable instead of sending it to the browser. output_buffering is turned off by default.

• You can use output buffering in situations when you want to modify headers after sending content.

Consider this example: