Jeff is correct with his statement that adding <? and ?> will solve your problem of the text comming up when you go to that page. Don't worry about closing off the first <? in the file your including into, you can nest the <?s and ?>s and it works fine.
One other thing to look out for in the future is a user trying to call open one of your included scripts that performs specific actions that should NOT be performed without being included into a parent file. (The best way around it is to wrap everything in functions so that merely opening the page from a browser will not do anything.) A quick and easy solution from keeping the page from executing without being included is as follows:
<?
if(basename($SCRIPT_NAME) == basename(FILE))
{
exit;
}
echo "Hello world!";
?>
This checks to see if the parent script's name is the same as the actual script that's processing and if they match exits execution. This requires that the file be included into another file for it to execute.
Happy coding,
Kris Jordan
