Bug #16838 Updated: PHP short_open_tags and <?xml .. ?>

ID: 16838 Updated by: proprietor@pp4.de Reported By: sloetz@web.de Status: Analyzed Bug Type: Scripting Engine problem Operating System: all PHP Version: 4.2.0 New Comment: We shortly stumbled into that 'problem', too. Actually a contractor of ours did, that is. - We are sending everything through php, even static html. We do not have much, kiss (keep is stupid simple) and there some statistics reasons. - We host several loosely relatd sites, for clients who sometimes (let) code on their own; we add to theis sites, some other stuff is directly outsourced by us. - a young employee of one of our contractors recently approached me with a nicely made several-pages paper demonstrating a "bug in he server" ! Yes alas, he tried to use xml, clashed with php short tags, and here you go! He had no real knowledge of php at all, and he did not know we were using it, anyways. - I scanned our site for short tags: Found many. I tried to auto-replace them with long tags: many sites did not work any more. I tried to also replace "<?=" with "<?php echo" and it also did not work :-( - I ran a q&d count against our web sites & found roughly as many "<?" as ("<?[:whitespace:]" plus "<?=" plus "<?php") so => I propose to add an option to the php.ini that restricts short tags to ones like "<?" followed by whitespace or followed by "=" and leaves everything else alone. Pu <proprietor@pp4.de> Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2002-04-26 11:43:24] sniper@php.net Only good solution is to get rid of the short tags. It only saves you 3 keystrokes.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2002-04-26 11:41:25] sniper@php.net Only good solution is to get rid of the short tags. It only saves you 3 keystrokes.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2002-04-26 11:10:08] hholzgra@php.net people have been warned for *ages* now that short tags are *not* xml-compliant, so everybody still using them should be blamed for doing so and not benn supported in continuing using bad style ... instead of adding extra magic i'd suggest to emmit warnings for uses of '<?' even if short_tags are enabled ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2002-04-26 06:28:43] sloetz@web.de Hi, turning off short tags is not a real solution as long as PHP offically supports them. There are tons of code out there using short tags and there will be even more new code with short tags if this feature will not be abolished. Furthermore, and I have to repeat this, there is huge group of PHP users that has no access to the php.ini settings (e.g. mod_php with safe_mode in a shared hosting environment). Should these users be forced to modify third-party code over and over again because the developers of this code insist on (offically supported) short tags? For companies and groups that offer web hosting services this is simply not viable. You can't over web hosting with mutual exclusion of XHTML and PHP. And I also have to stress that again: PHP, a *hypertext preprocessor*, is not able to parse standard compliant XHTML! I think there are only two solutions: Doing it the hard way by wholly removing short tags or changing PHP in a way that allows the usage of XHTML and short tags. A third approach to this problem is not a real solution but an option for the user, namely switching to another scripting language. Sascha ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2002-04-26 05:51:35] derick@php.net Then just turn off short-tags. And there won't be any change in this, as: 1. It came up numerous times on php-dev 2. It makes little sense Derick ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The remainder of the comments for this report are too long. To view the rest of the comments, please view the bug report online at http://bugs.php.net/16838 -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/?id=16838&edit=1