What is the significance of not outputting any content before setting a cookie in PHP, and how can this be achieved?

Outputting content before setting a cookie in PHP can cause an error because cookies must be set before any content is sent to the browser. To achieve this, you can use output buffering to store the output in a buffer until the cookie is set, then flush the buffer to send the content along with the cookie. 

<?php
ob_start(); // Start output buffering

// Set the cookie
setcookie("example_cookie", "value", time() + 3600, "/");

ob_end_flush(); // Flush the output buffer
?>

Keywords

output buffering setcookie headers_sent ob_start ob_end_flush

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