[RESOLVED] Help with code validation

Revraz

Old VB coder here trying to learn PHP. I have downloaded 2 different editors, PHP Designer and HTML-Kit in order to assist my old eyes in catching errors while I code.

I have created a simple HTML page with PHP code inside. I am just doing a simple DB connect to query a Table and display the rows. Something is not working correctly, because when I preview the code or upload the page to my Webhost (my webhost uses PHP4), it just displays the code instead of the output that should be generated, so I assume I have a syntax error somewhere.

The problem is, neither one of these editors will check my code to see if I'm missing a { ; or anything else (like how VB will help correct missing items).

So my question is, what is an easy way to validate my code?

Also, if I post my code, can someone review it for me and see if they can see what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks for any help.

mphllps

The problem is more than likely, the file extension you have saved your file with. Most servers require you to save php files with a .php file extension, or older servers will even accept .php3 as the file extension.

My guess is that you saved the file as a .html. If that is indeed the case most servers will not invoke the php parsing engine on a .html file and will just output the code like it is rendering it as html.

Revraz

Thanks Miles for the quick reply, I did save it as .html and I'll give your advice a shot.

Revraz

That did it Miles, thanks again.

Any advice on how I can easily do code validation?

mphllps

There are some applications out there that let you do it locally. Zend I believe makes one for example. However, I generally just upload my code and let the php parser spit out parse errors. Most of them are fairly accurate. There are a few of them that make you just go "Huh?". You learn what those mean fairly quickly though.

Some webhosts turn off error reporting and only log them to a log. Check out this link on the php.net website. http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.error-reporting.php