For doing formatting with the printf(), there is need to wrap output in <pre> tags. Is this the best way of showing formatted plain text on a browser?

<pre> tags can be useful if you want to preserve plain-text formatting in an HTML context.
If you want to output an entire text document to the browser, however, it is neater to tell the browser to format the entire output as plain text. You can do this with the header() function:Header (“Content-Type: Text/Plain”);

If I do a header(“Location: http://xyz.com&#8221;) does that get sent to the browser immediately? In other words, can I then do other stuff after the header command without worrying about delaying the redirect to the browser?

use htaccess to redirect

You have to do what you have to do before the header Location thing or, you can use meta refresh with a small delay.

I wants to redirect and some code executed. How do you do that with .htaccess?

htaccess is not always the best choice. In forums like phpBB the header function is used because they first need to check if for example a user is logged in or not. Then it’s so much easier to use the header function.

code 2 be executed…..
header(“Location: somepage.php”);
exit

How can I send that variable from one file to the other?I have a variable called $url that is defined in the first file. now i want to use that variable in the second file.

Any advice

you could save the variables as Session variables

You could put your variables in vars.php, and then

include(“vars.php”);

At the top of every page you want the variables in.