If php is barfing on echo "howdy"; then you have an unclosed " up above somewhere, like this:
print "boy, this code is messed up!;
if (something){
$a=1;
$b=2;
}
print "and I mean it.";
In the above example, I didn't close my first print statement's ", so the lines that come after look like part of the print statement to the interpreter. I.e. everythin from the first quote to the second one are just string data for the first print command. Right after the second quote, the interpreter starts trying to understand the command "and" which is doesn't, and fails. If you then escape the " before and with \", then everything from the first " to the last " above becomes one line of code, telling the machine to print nearly everything.
A good trick for fixing this is to either use a good color coded editor which can pick up this stuff and show it pretty well, or link your php code file to another file, same name, ending in .phps If your server is setup to interpret these, it will show them in color highlighted form, and you can easily find things like run on strings.
