Question

Ok maybe not so puzzling, but here it is.

I was messing around and noticed this, typing just <?php in a file, just that, no space after that, nothing else just the tag, throws a parse error.

With a single space it works fine. I was wondering if anyone knows why the parser chokes, since it is perfectly okay otherwise to omit the closing tag.
Thanks.

Answer 1

The PHP documentation says:

In PHP 5.2 and earlier, the parser does not allow the <?php opening
tag to be the only thing in a file. This is allowed as of PHP 5.3.

With that said, in PHP 5.3, if you have short_open_tags set to On in your php.ini file, the error still shows up.