Random text/values showing up in my code

1998TJ

I'm building a site w/ PHP & MySQL (learning as I go). Anyway, when I navigate through my product links I sometimes get random "hiccups" of code that display on the page where they shouldn't. Sometimes the code is a portion of an html tag, sometimes its random characters combined. Whenever this happens, I can hit Refresh and the page will display fine. There doesn't seem to be any patterns to these hiccups and the same characters usually don't show up twice (or in the same spots).

Anyone know what would cause this? I am using an include file for my lefthand navigation and then the center content is dynamically generated from the db....is my pc just not able to render all of the info fast enough so that some of it is getting garbled? Or could I have an errant tag or quote somewhere? I've checked the code and can't find any errors. Also, I do not see any PHP or MySQL-specific error messages.

Here is just one example of the strange things I'm getting:
This line of code,

<div align="center"><h2>Jeep Wheels - Reviews</h2></div>

Was replaced by this after a refresh:

<div align=" + aer"><h2>Jeep Wheels - Reviews</h2></div>

Hit refresh again, and the page goes back to normal.
I've scrutinized my code, but don't see any glaring errors...it's starting to drive me nuts!

Any thoughts??

Thanks!

eoghain

Is it happening in all browsers?
Is it happening on other computers?

Make sure you've tried these other things and are still getting the errors, if so then move your code to another host and test again. Errors that you can't reliably re-create are the hardest to track down, but given the large number of vunerabilities in Windows and IE I'd first make sure the problems happened on other browsers, computers, and operating systems before I tried ripping everything apart to find the error in my code.

1998TJ

Originally posted by eoghain
Is it happening in all browsers?
Is it happening on other computers?

Well, I did some more testing today on my pc at work. Here is what I found:

Windows 98: I cannot reproduce any errors with IE6, Netscape 6.2, or Opera 6.

Windows 2000: I will eventually get some quirky code if I click enough links. Errors can be reproduced w/ IE6, IE5, Netscape 6.2, and Opera 7.5.

So, based upon that informal experiment, I would conclude that Win2K isn't happy with something.? Perhaps it's the server that my site is running on?....the site is currently running on my spare PC with Win 2K Server Advanced, PHP, & MySQL installed on it. When I actually decide to put the site "live" I'm going look for a Unix host.....not sure if that'll help or not??

Thanks.

eoghain

Windows 2000: I will eventually get some quirky code if I click enough links. Errors can be reproduced w/ IE6, IE5, Netscape 6.2, and Opera 7.5.

Did you try this on multiple machines running Windows 2000 or have these errors always occourd on the same machine? Maybe there is something wrong with that machine.

1998TJ

Originally posted by eoghain
Did you try this on multiple machines running Windows 2000 or have these errors always occourd on the same machine? Maybe there is something wrong with that machine.

I tried it on my two home PCs....one of them runs Win2K and the other runs Win2K Server Adv (this one hosts the web site in question). I was able to reproduce errors w/ both machines.

I guess I should try to recruit some more Win2K users (and Mac users) and see if they have issues too.

Thanks.