Force Plain Text Format in Internet Explorer WITHOUT Registry Hack [SOLVED]

Internet Explorer uses MIME sniffing to parse pages and will erroneously render the following page as html:

header('Content-Type: text/plain');
echo '<body>';
echo '<span style="font-size:600%;">';
echo 'normal <strong>bold</strong>';
echo '</span>';

To force Internet Explorer to render the page as plain text, add the following before any text is output:

header('Content-Type: text/plain');
echo '                                                  ';
echo '                                                  ';
echo '                                                  ';
echo '                                                  ';
echo '                                                  ';
echo "\n";

Example: The following will render as plain text in Internet Explorer:

header('Content-Type: text/plain');
echo '                                                  ';
echo '                                                  ';
echo '                                                  ';
echo '                                                  ';
echo '                                                  ';
echo "\n";
echo '<body>';
echo '<span style="font-size:600%;">';
echo 'normal <strong>bold</strong>';
echo '</span>';

Or simply:

header('Content-Type: text/plain');
echo str_repeat(' ', 250) . "\n";
echo '<body>';
echo '<span style="font-size:600%;">';
echo 'normal <strong>bold</strong>';
echo '</span>';

UPDATE: Sending the X-Content-Type-Options response header will stop MIME-sniffing.

header('X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff');

2 comments

  1. anonymous –

    Thanks, just what I was looking for.

  2. anonymous –
    As used in wordpress: /** * Send a HTTP header to disable content type sniffing in browsers which support it. * * @link http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/07/02/ie8-security-part-v-comprehensive-protection.aspx * @link http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=rev&revision=6985 * * @since 3.0.0 * @return none */ function send_nosniff_header() {     @header( 'X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff' ); } https://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/wp-includes/functions.php

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