Question

I’m working within the XAMPP environment on a windows 7 64-bit machine. I have Apache 2.4 service installed. The issue I’m having has baffled me for about a day now.

My php files have all executed as expected up to this point. Recently, I’ve created a file which begins with the following:

    function get_web_page($url,$attempt=1){
        if($attempt <4){
            $options = array(
                CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,     // return web page
                CURLOPT_HEADER         => false,    // don't return headers
                CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,     // follow redirects
                CURLOPT_ENCODING       => "",       // handle all encodings
                CURLOPT_USERAGENT      => "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20120427 Firefox/15.0a1", // who am i
                CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER    => true,     // set referer on redirect
                CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 30,      // timeout on connect
                CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 30,      // timeout on response
                CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      => 10,       // stop after 10 redirects
            );
            $ch      = curl_init( $url );
            curl_setopt_array( $ch, $options );
            $content = curl_exec( $ch );
            $err     = curl_errno( $ch );
            $errmsg  = curl_error( $ch );
            $header  = curl_getinfo( $ch );
            curl_close( $ch );

            if($err == 0){
                return $content;
            }else{
                return get_web_page( $url, $attempt + 1 );
            }
        }else{
            return FALSE;
        }
    }

A simple function to retrieve a web page, and it doesn’t echo anything, either.
But when I visit this page in a browser (which at this point ONLY defines a function and nothing else), it prints to the page everything following the first instance of “=>” (without quotes). I don’t understand why this is. All of my other php files in the same directory behave as expected.

Please help me understand why this is happening and what steps I should take to resolve it.

Answer 1

Look at the source of the page given to your browser and you’ll probably see the entire php source in plaintext. It’s only rendering what’s after the first => because that’s likely the first closing > it finds after the opening < in <?php. The first part doesn’t render because your browser thinks it’s inside some strange HTML tag.

Check your apache config, because it’s not routing requests for *.php pages through the PHP interpreter.