Apache problem

tekmann33 · 07-26-2008, 02:52 PM

I have a server (Fedora 8 Platform) that runs Analog (WebStat Analyzer) and Apache 2.2.8.

Analog creates an html file that I can display with Apache. However, when I display Analogs html stats page, I get the following line in the browser:

Code:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/ob_proxyStats.html on line 1

When I open up the html page, the lines it is refering to are not php lines, but xml. Here are the first 10 or so lines of the file:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="#internalStyle" type="text/css"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Web Server Statistics for Test Library</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
<meta name="generator" content="analog 6.0/Unix" />
<style type="text/css" id="internalStyle">
h2 {
        background-color: #A0C0F0;
        width: 98%;
        padding: 3px 6px;
}
table {
        text-align: right;

When I delete the fist two xml lines, the page renders without a problem.

Not sure why apache can't handle xml lines. I've used analog with apache on another machine, but I believe with the same version of analog and a later version of apache, so I am not sure what the problem is with xml tags and apache.

Does anybody see why I am getting this Parse error with these xml lines in this file?

comprookie2000 · 07-27-2008, 03:31 AM

Does the page validate?
http://validator.w3.org/

tekmann33 · 07-27-2008, 11:13 AM

This is just a test server on a local / private network. I can't validate it unless it is public.

trevelluk · 08-03-2008, 12:08 PM

Despite what it might look like, the error is coming from PHP, not Apache. It would seem that Apache has been configured to treat .html files as PHP, and PHP has been configured to allow "short tags" to open a block of PHP code, which will mean the "<?" construct will be seen as the start of a block of PHP. See http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.basic-syntax.php for more information on short tags.

You've got a few choices here:
1. Configure Apache not to run .html files through the PHP parser. This will of course require administrative access to any servers this application will be running on, and may have implications for any other applications on the server.

2. Alter your PHP settings file (php.ini) to not allow short tags. This will again require administrative access to the server, and may affect other applications.

3. Accept that the page will be parsed as PHP, and get the XML declarations output in that way, something like the following:

PHP Code:



print '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>'; 
print '<?xml-stylesheet href="#internalStyle" type="text/css"?>';

As the file in question is (presumably) automatically generated by Analog, then this would mean delving into the Analog source code and modifying it (I'm assuming its open source, but to be honest I'm not familiar with it). This option would have the requirement that any server where the application will be run must execute .html files as PHP.

Hopefully the above makes some kind of sense.

Incidentally, it is possible to upload a file to the W3C validation service to perform validation of local files, at http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_upload