Writing PHP code with PHP script

oakld

Hello, I've got script with such code [simplified example]:

<?
$myvar = '<h1>Page</h1><? any_php_code(); ?>';
...
FPutS($fp, StripCslashes($myvar))
?>

It used to work well, but I updated my system and it doesn't work anymore - it seems the php tags in the $myvar string are parsed!
Does anybody have any idea how to fix this (probably Apache issue) or how to sidetrack the problem using other syntaxe?

Thanks!

Houdini

Change

<?
$myvar = '<h1>Page</h1><? any_php_code(); ?>';
...
FPutS($fp, StripCslashes($myvar))
?>

<?php
$myvar = '<h1>Page</h1><?php any_php_code(); ?>';
...
FPutS($fp, StripCslashes($myvar))
?>

and run it

oakld

Well, thanks for answer. But I don't understand how's that supposed to help - the "<?php" and "<?" tags are equivalent, aren't they?

I quickly tried to change it and it seems it doesn't work. But I tried it on much more complicated script, so I'm just trying to say just changing the tag doesn't help. I think kind of backslashing "lower than" or "question mark" would help. The < doesn't work as it's written same way into the file...

Houdini

It makes a difference if short tags are not enabled becase the server can not process the information, when you said that you had upgraded your system it is quite possible that "short tags" were not enabled and the parser would not be able to know that <? means that it is a php script.
From the manual

There are four different pairs of opening and closing tags which can be used in php. Two of those, <?php ?> and <script language="php"> </script>, are always available. The other two are short tags and ASP style tags, and can be turned on and off from the php.ini configuration file. As such, while some people find short tags and ASP style tags convenient, they are less portable, and generally not recommended.

Note: Also note that if you are embedding PHP within XML or XHTML you will need to use the <?php ?> tags to remain compliant with standards.

Using <?php will always work whereas using "short tags" might not especially if the user that is using your script has short tags disabled in the php.ini.

Another thing you might want to look at is the StripCslashes() is this your own function?

Weedpacket

No, stripcslashes() and fputs() are both native PHP functions, the original poster just has an unorthodox way of capitalising them.

As far as I can tell, the code strips backslashes (which aren't there in the example code, but I'm presuming it stands for arbitrary stuff that does contain slashes when necessary) from a string and writes the result to a file, so that in this case a file that contains

<h1>Page</h1><? any_php_code(); ?>

oakld

Weedpacket wrote:
As far as I can tell, the code strips backslashes (which aren't there in the example code, but I'm presuming it stands for arbitrary stuff that does contain slashes when necessary) from a string and writes the result to a file, so that in this case a file that contains
<h1>Page</h1><? any_php_code(); ?>

Yes, you're 100% right. The case thing is because I just wrote it as an example and mixed it up...

The problem is, that IT IS PARSED, while I DON'T WANT TO PARSE the code in $myvar, as it should be written into the file, which will be HTML/PHP page. The problem is, that when i use "<?" or "<?php" tag, the $myvar became empty... It used to work, but don't work now and I have no idea how to fix it.

The code is inside a application, which allows to define tables for MySQL, save settings, and generate web sites to:

list content of database
show details of selected entry
add new entry into database
remove entry
change entry

So you see it's a huge problem :-( as I have a lot of code hanging on the problem...