caching - Answering HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE and HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH in PHP

Question

I have cacheable dynamic content made in PHP 5.1.0+. I already send the correct headers (including Last-Modified and ETag) to clients.

I now want my script to be able to answer $_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE'] and $_SERVER['HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH'] when present. When the conditions matches, I want to answer a HTTP 304 "Not Modified" to clients.

What are the correct conditions? When exactly I issue a 304 instead of the whole content?

The accepted answer in question How to know when to send a 304 Not Modified response seems to issue this correctly but I have hard times to port that code to PHP 5.

Thank you!

Answer 1

I've always used:

function caching_headers ($file, $timestamp) {
    $gmt_mtime = gmdate('r', $timestamp);
    header('ETag: "'.md5($timestamp.$file).'"');
    header('Last-Modified: '.$gmt_mtime);
    header('Cache-Control: public');

    if(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE']) || isset($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH'])) {
        if ($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE'] == $gmt_mtime || str_replace('"', '', stripslashes($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_NONE_MATCH'])) == md5($timestamp.$file)) {
            header('HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified');
            exit();
        }
    }
}

Don't remember whether I wrote it or got it from somewhere else...

I'm normally using it at the top of a file in this way:

caching_headers ($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'], filemtime($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']));