PHP - getting a parse error after emacs indent-region

BrianK · 12-16-2005, 07:05 PM

This is very strange... I've been pounding my head on this for a while.

I'm working on some php code that was written by someone else who likes to use a '#' to denote a comment. Emacs, for some reason, doesn't like the '#' and does not indent properly when it is used to denote comments. Because of that, I went through and replaced all the '#' with "//" and tested that the code still worked... it did. So then I selected the entire file (1600 lines or so) and used the indent-region function in emacs to make the code more easily readable... now I get a parse error, and a strange one at that:

Parse error: parse error, unexpected ']', expecting T_STRING or T_VARIABLE or T_NUM_STRING

It's refering to the bold line:

Code:

    while ($line = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_NUM)) {
      $order_array[] = $line[0];
    }

Because I was getting frustrated, I just commented out that line to see if it would work, but I still get the same error on the same line - even if the line is a comment! If I change the code so that it does not have any square brackets, the same error comes up on the next square bracket in the file.

What gives?

BrianK · 12-16-2005, 07:25 PM

Figures - as soon as I resort to asking, I figure it out.

The problem was upstream a bit further with this bit of code:

Code:

$query = <<< QUERY
SELECT foo
FROM bar
WHERE stuff;
QUERY;

Evidently, all lines must start at column 0 between QUERY and QUERY.

What the heck is the "<<<" operator anyway? Looks kinda like a struct of some sort... ?