I got sloppy, but is there a work-around

[rtcary]

In my scripts, I used "<?" rather than "<?php". This works fine on my Linux system running php 4.3 and on my Windows system (2K) running php 4.3.

Now I would like to have the ability to write some scripts on my notebook and test them, so I installed Apache with php 5 on my Vista notebook and this setup requires "<?php", or so it seems.

Is this a php 5 requirement or is it something I did not setup correctly in Apache?

And yes, I will use "<?php" from now on and will probably fix all of the scripts, but I would like to know the answer to the above question.

Todd

"Sloppiness can come to bite you"

[NogDog]

It is the short_open_tag setting, which you can enable in your php.ini file (or at the directory level via .htaccess). As the short tag could collide with <?xml tags, the general consensus now is that it's best to turn this off and always use full <?php tags.

[Weedpacket]

Here's a script I cobbled together to work around someone else's code that mixed short and long tags.

<?php
$sr = array(
	'<?='=>'<? echo',
	'<?'=>'<?php ',
	'<?php php'=>'<?php',
	'<?php xml'=>'<?xml',
	'<?php  '=>'<?php ');

file_put_contents(
	$argv[1],
	str_replace(
		array_keys($sr),
		array_values($sr),
		file_get_contents(
			$argv[1])));
?>

Run it from the command line with the name of the offending file.