[RESOLVED] PHP5 OOP Parse error

confounded

I'm new to PHP5 as I'm sure my question is just about to demonstrate.

I'm trying to experiment with member visibility in a class but every time I try this I get the dreaded Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING message.

A simple example

class testclass
{
private $testprivate;
}

The parser does not like the 'private' declaration and it does not matter if I change it to public.

I have tried this on two different versions of PHP 5.X one a Ubuntu Linux 8.04 that phpinfo claims is running PHP Version 5.2.4-2ubuntu5.6 and the other is a Mac book running PHP Version 5.2.8. So I'm beginning to suspect that there is a configuration setting somewhere that has to be explicitly set to handle this.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

NogDog

For a quick sanity check, what does the following output?

echo phpversion();

(Unless I'm missing something, the only reason I can see for that error is if it were being executed in a version less than 5.0.0.)

confounded

Thanks NogDog for the quick response.

Just tried that on the Linux box and it spat out 5.2.4-2ubuntu5.6 as I suspected it would but worth doing the sanity check. It does seem as if it is running in some kind of PHP4 mode as all the code I have cobbled together to talk to MySQL works fine it's only when I try to use the PHP5 advanced stuff I hit the problem. It's not that this is only supported in PHP5.3 + is it?

laserlight

Just to confirm: this is the entire PHP script, right?

<?php
class testclass
{
    private $testprivate;
}

The problem occurred on both the PHP 5 installations?

NogDog

I've been using the PHP5 OOP syntax for quite some time now in various versions of PHP5.x, it's definitely not a 5.3+ thing. (To the best of my knowledge it's a PHP5.0.0 thing.) I'd try the simplest possible script as Laserlight suggests, to strip out all other possibilities of other syntax errors being the root cause.

confounded

Thanks all for your help I knew it had to be crazy!

laserlight: Yes these were the only lines of code but....

Just for the heck of it I copied your code snippet into a new file and it worked!!!

So I opened another new file and typed the lines in again saved it and tried it worked!!!

Opened the original tried it it did not work! Looked at all three versions side by side for a while and could see no difference. Then I opened them in a hex editor and hey presto some unknown invisible characters 0xC2A0.

Now I think of it I started copy and pasting some example code from the web and then paired it back to a minimum when I hit problems so I assume these characters were inserted by the copyt and paste.

Removing the 0xC2A0 characters fixed the problem.

Thanks again this had bugged me all day as I successively removed chunks of code to see what caused the problem!

laserlight

Ah well 🙂
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