How do I close a connection early?

Question

I\'m attempting to do an AJAX call (via JQuery) that will initiate a fairly long process. I\'d like the script to simply send a response indicating that the process has star

Answer 1

TL;DR Answer:

ignore_user_abort(true); //Safety measure so that the user doesn't stop the script too early.

$content = 'Hello World!'; //The content that will be sent to the browser.

header('Content-Length: ' . strlen($content)); //The browser will close the connection when the size of the content reaches "Content-Length", in this case, immediately.

ob_start(); //Content past this point...

echo $content;

//...will be sent to the browser (the output buffer gets flushed) when this code executes.
ob_end_flush();
ob_flush();
flush();

if(session_id())
{
    session_write_close(); //Closes writing to the output buffer.
}

//Anything past this point will be ran without involving the browser.

Function Answer:

ignore_user_abort(true);

function sendAndAbort($content)
{
    header('Content-Length: ' . strlen($content));

    ob_start();

    echo $content;

    ob_end_flush();
    ob_flush();
    flush();
}

sendAndAbort('Hello World!');

//Anything past this point will be ran without involving the browser.