unclosed php tags .. why not close all tags?

d_l

I'm setting up drupal-6.2

One coding matter which puzzles me .. in looking at the drupal php files

Some of the php files have unclosed tags

they start <?php .. but do not close with .. ?>

digging around I read this blog .

http://choosetheforce.blogspot.com/2008/05/should-you-close-that-php-tag.html

so .. the question is why leave php tags unclosed, and when to close?

madwormer2

I think what he is getting at is that when you call the header() function, to, for example, redirect the user to a different page

header('Location: http://example.com/page.php');

There must be no content echoed before it otherwise there will be an error.

If your script includes multiple PHP files, you may be including these before you're calling header. This is all good until at the end of one of the files, there is a trailing space AFTER the end PHP tag. This causes the header function to error, because there is already output been sent to the browser.

Not closing the end tag in the include file (as is permitted, apparently) means that you don't have to worry about a trailing space (or carriage return) appearing at the end of one of your includes.

dougal85

I only ever close them if I am going to have HTML content AFTER the ?>

Otherwise, why bother closing them?

d_l

thanks ..

Otherwise, why bother closing them?

My guess is for the same reasons you would close other tags .. </html>, </xml> etc. for syntax validation.

But it seems to work .. so I'll leave well alone in drupal.

dougal85

Ah, but... its perfectly valid syntax to not have the closing tag in PHP 🙂

NogDog

I make it a habit to explicitly not close my <?php tag at the end of any file which is - or might become - an include file. This is so that I do not ever have to worry about an extraneous newline (or other white-space character) after the closing tag causing problems with anything that sends headers (setcookie(), session_start(), header(), etc.).

Since the majority of the files I create are, in fact, includes, I generally just avoid a final closing "?>" most of the time, as it does not hurt anything to leave it out, whereas it can sometimes cause problems if you put it in and do not ensure that nothing follows it.