I was helping someone in IRC deal with some "headers already sent" issues and told them to use ob_start. Very diligently, the person went looking for why that was the right answer. He did not find a good explination. I looked around and I did not either. So, here is why this happens and why ob_start can fix it.

How HTTP works

HTTP is the communication protocol that happens between your web server and the user's browser.  Without too much detail, this is broken into two pieces of data: headers and the body.  The body is the HTML you send. But, before the body is sent, the HTTP headers are sent. Here is an example of an HTTP request response including headers:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:30:34 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.12-pl0-gentoo
Set-Cookie: WCSESSID=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; expires=Sun, 28-Feb-2010 15:30:34 GMT; path=/
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=99
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Ramblings of a web guy</title>
.
.
 So, all those lines before the HTML starts have to come first. HTTP headers are where things like cookies and redirection occur. When a PHP script starts to send HTML out to the browser, the headers are stopped and the body begins. When your code tries to set a cookie after this has started, you get the "headers already sent" error message.

How ob_start works

So, how does ob_start help? The ob in ob_start stands for output buffering. ob_start will buffer the output (HTML) until the page is completely done. Once the page is completely done, the headers are sent and then the output is sent. This means any calls to setcookie or the header function will not cause an error and will be sent to the browser properly. You do need to call ob_start before any output occurs. If you start output, it is too late.

The down side

The down side of doing this is that the output is buffered and sent all at once. That means that the time between the user request and the time the first byte gets back to the user is longer than it has to be. However, in modern PHP application design, this is often already the case. An MVC framework for example would do all the data gathering before any presentation is done. So, your application may not have any issue with this.

Another down side is that you (or someone) could get lazy and start throwing setcookie calls in any old place. This should be avoided. It is simply not good programming design. In a perfect world, we would not need output buffering to solve this problem for us.