Question

Is it possible to enable php short-open-tag for a single script ??

The solutions that i have gone through mention adding short_open_tag=On in php.ini

or

php_value short_open_tag 1 to .htaccess

Can’t we enable them under a php script like we enable error reporting..??

Answer 1

TL;DR – No, those are the only two options you have.

If you can’t do any of the mentioned methods, you will need a container script that sets the value before including the script with short open tags.

<?php

ini_set('short_open_tag', 'On');
include 'myscript.php';

This will prevent a parse error in myscript.php due to short open tags.

The documentation isn’t very clear about this, but apparently this stopped working since PHP 4 after which it can only be changed using .htaccess or editing php.ini. This excerpt seems to imply that it might work from 5.3 onwards:

PHP_INI_ALL in PHP 4.0.0. PHP_INI_PERDIR in PHP < 5.3.0

But that’s not the case, as can be seen from answers of Cannot turn off short_open_tag with ini_set

I’ve lodged a bug report for this documentation issue.

Update

The documentation will be updated to reflect this behaviour more explicitly:

… it’s been PHP_INI_SYSTEM | PHP_INI_PERDIR since 4.0.1.