&lt;? VS &lt;?php

<? VS <?php

sempuritoza

What problems may occur if I was to start a script with the <? tag instead of <?php even when php is configured to allow short open tags?

I only know about the server not being configure to handle the former,

thanks for help in advance.

boris_ph

there r different ways to embed PHP scripts into HTML
<?php echo "hello world";?>

<? echo "hello world";?>

<% echo "hello world";%>
(this format needs the php.ini option asp_tag to be turn on!

<?php ?> is most universally used,your tag will always be correctly interpreted. 🙂

sempuritoza

thanks for the reply but its actually a question that I need to answer in detail, I kinda need to know specifically what else could go wrong if one was to use <? instead of <?php

Houdini

When XML got to be more widely used then the use of this tag was not an issue. Also you can not control how a host will configure their PHP and if they also want to offer users PHP then it is not likely at all that short tags will be enabled. <?php will always work regardless of the server configuration whereas <? wil not.

If you write scripts that others will be using also then using short tags will give you an inbox full of e-mails about the script not working. Here on this iste there are always the questions about "Hey my host just upgraded the PHP on their server and now my scripts don't work, what could be the cause of this?" then when they post their script you find that they are using short tags and the simple addition of php to all those scripts fixes it.

It simply is not a good practice these days to use such shortcuts, and it is not really that much more typing so why take the risk when it is just not necessary. There are many things you could do to make a working script but there could be more things you could do with it like the use of addslashes or mysql_real_string_escape() for some data insertion if you are going to write the script in the first place make it as comprehensive as possible with the knowledge that you have.