Question

Possible Duplicates:
Are PHP short tags acceptable to use?
Reference – What does this symbol mean in PHP?

Hi Guys,

I can’t seem to find any information about the <?= shortcut of php.
Does anyone of you know more about that?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You are looking for the PHP ini directive short_open_tag
It enables the support for <? instead of <?php

From the docs:

Note:

This directive also affects the shorthand <?=, which is identical to

short_open_tag to be on.

There has been no announcement whatsoever that support should be discontinued. You can regard <?= as supported as <?=.

There are however some weird preconfigured systems that don’t have it enabled by default.

For example some debian version in early php5 versions.

So to be on the save side you should do <?php

php.net also says:

Note:

Using short tags should be avoided
when developing applications or
libraries that are meant for
redistribution, or deployment on PHP
servers which are not under your
control, because short tags may not be
supported on the target server. For
portable, redistributable code, be
sure not to use short tags.

which i would interpret at, you are totally fine as long as you can control your settings.

Documentation is here: http://php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php
and here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.basic-syntax.phpmode.php