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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T15:38:35+00:00

My problem is the following: To keep order in my scripts, I always put

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My problem is the following: To keep order in my scripts, I always put lots of spaces in my if-statements, like this:

if( ! isset( $_GET['user'] ) || ! isset( $_GET['user'] ) )
   ...

From time to time, though everything seems correct, this produces errors like “Unexpected T_STRING…” etc. Then I change the line to:

if(!isset($_GET['user'])||!isset($_GET['user']))
   ...

save the file, re-insert the spaces, save the file again and everything works fine. Any ideas what could cause this? Is it maybe a bug of the PHP parser?

(It’s not specifically this statement, it happens with many such spaces-including statements)

Edit: I just managed to revert the file to when it didn’t work, this is the exact code that produces the error:

if(! isset( $_GET['user'] ) || ! isset( $_GET['parent'] ) )

I also changed every character in sequence, it seems to be the space between || and !.

The error message says:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting ',' or ')' in ...

You can download the file here: http://geardev.de/test.zip

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This looks like a character-encoding problem. I’m not sure the exact character encoding that you’re using that is causing this, but when you open up the PHP file using a hex editor, the space character you’ve correctly identified as causing this is actually a multi-byte character \xC2 & \xA0. All other space characters are \x20 as they should be:
    enter image description here

    Edit:
    \xC2A0 is the UTF-8 way of encoding U+00A0 (non-breaking space). This could have come from copying-and-pasting from a browser, a PDF, or an advanced text editor, or maybe your keyboard has Shift+Space mapped to NBSP.

    There have been complaints by people of Netbeans inserting NBSP randomly into their code, but I suspect this is due to the user accidentally holding Shift when typing the space.

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