What are the best practices for structuring PHP code to avoid conflicts with header functions like session_start()?

To avoid conflicts with header functions like session_start(), it is best practice to ensure that no output is sent to the browser before calling session_start(). This can be achieved by placing session_start() at the very beginning of the PHP script, before any HTML or whitespace.

<?php
session_start();

// Rest of the PHP code goes here
?>