Question

I’m new to PHP and have installed on Linux to boot (also a newbie). Anyway, PHP is working…

<? $myVar = 'test'; echo($myVar); ?> 

… works just fine.

But…

<?  $dbhost = 'localhost'; $dbuser = 'myuser'; $dbpass = 'mypass'; $dbname = 'mydb';  echo($dbhost . '-' . $dbuser . '-' . $dbpass . '-' . $dbname);  $conn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die('Unable to connect to MySQL'); print $conn;  mysql_close($conn);  phpInfo(); ?> 

… does nothing. Nor errors, nothing. Its as if the code isn’t even there.

Any help?

Answer 1

Try to do the following:

1. First make sure display_errors is turned on in your php configuration file. Also set the level of error_reporting to show all errors, including strict (error_reporting = E_ALL|E_STRICT). After you make changes, restart your webserver.
2. Run phpinfo(), and check that the mysql extension is installed and working. If it isn’t make sure that you uncommented it in the php configuration file (again, remember to restart apache after each change to the configuration file).
3. At this point MySQL should be loaded and working, and you should be able to tell from the error (if it persists) what’s the problem.
4. Try also dumping the contents of the connection result ($conn) to see what it contains.
5. In general, I’d recommend using long php tags (<?php and not <?) since it is more portable (short tags are off by default in PHP 5 installations).