Including a file with a question mark in it breaks my php

ayteebee · 11-15-2006, 05:46 PM

I'm trying to include the XML declaration and the document type description in my PHP pages, but I seem to be having trouble with the question marks in the XML declaration messing up my PHP server. The page is /pages/index.php and it's including /include/dtd.htm. Here are the [relevant] contents of the two files:

/index.php:

Code:

<?php include '../include/dtd.php'; ?>

<html>

<head>
...

/include/dtd.htm:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

This results in the following message:

Code:

Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_STRING in http://www.ayteebee.co.uk/pages/index.php on line 1

Commenting out the ? with a \ works ok, but then it doesn't validate. Here is a list of everything I've tried so far and its result:

1) Commenting out the ? with a \: Parses, but the backslash is left in the source code, so it doesn't validate.
2) Commenting out the entire line with a #: Parses, but again, the hash is left in the source so it doesn't validate.
3) Changing dtd.htm to dtd.php and calling the statements using the echo function: Still won't parse, trying above hacks has the same problems as before.
4) Swapping the <?xml ... ?> and <!DOCTYPE ...> lines around: As 3).
5) Enclosing the ? in single or double quotations: Once again, the quotations are left in the source.
6) I searched the internet and LQ, but didn't seem to find anything, which seems odd, because it can't be an uncommon problem. However I'm not the best webcrawler.

Oh, and I don't have access to the configuration files and stuff (cheap webhost).

So now I'm all out of ideas. How do I include a file without the question mark breaking things?

Thanks in advance.

graemef · 11-15-2006, 11:10 PM

A couple of ideas...

try require() in place of include(), if it can't open the file you will get an fatal error. Although from some of your test that doesn't look like the problem.

Try removing the include and putting it in the main file but echo it out, then move that to the external file.

ayteebee · 11-16-2006, 01:09 PM

Thanks Graeme. I'm afraid that using require() didn't make any difference.

Quote:

Try removing the include and putting it in the main file but echo it out, then move that to the external file.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. Do you mean to put the contents of /include/dtd.php into /pages/index.php instead of having the include? I think I might do this as it's going to be the same for all pages anyway and this would involve less processing and disk load on the server. However what do you mean by "echo it out, then move that to the external file"?

It would be nice to deal with this just for the sake of experience.

ayteebee · 11-16-2006, 01:21 PM

Hmm, I don't seem to have brackets around the filename when I use include() or require() but it still seems to work. What's going on there?

ayteebee · 11-16-2006, 03:40 PM

YES!! FINA-FREAKIN-LY!!

It seems that PHP doesn't like having the angle bracket and the question mark together in the form <? or ?>. The solution therefore is to separate them. As follows:

Code:

<?php
        echo '<';
        echo '?';
        echo 'xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"';
        echo '?';
        echo '>';
?>

Now the question is, WhyTF didn't I think of that earlier???

AdaHacker · 11-16-2006, 04:14 PM

Another solution would have been to simply turn off short_open_tag in your php.ini or in a .htaccess file.

ayteebee · 11-16-2006, 04:22 PM

HAHA! No, scrub that! The problem was that I've put all my pages into the /pages/ directory and I just put an include in /index.php to make it include the page /pages/index.php . This usually worked fine, but for some reason b0rked when it had the XML and doctype declaration in the included file. I don't know why.

Now I've changed the include to a redirect which works fine.