[PHP] (SOLVED) Re: [PHP] parse error, unexpected T_ENCAPSED_AND_WHITESPACE

[Jeff Schmidt]

Ok, well the mystery is solved. Earlier in the script, I had used 
HEREDOC string delimiting to output some html blocks (I feel, 
asthetically, that HEREDOC is more readable than escaping out to HTML 
then back into PHP). Somehow, and I'm not sure how, because I don't 
remember typing the spaces, but somehow, exactly 4 spaces got inserted 
after each of my heredoc delimiter tokens in my script. Well, PHP isn't, 
apparently, smart enough to ignore the white space after the delimiter, 
and decided that the entire rest of my script constituted one large 
HEREDOC block.

I only caught this after putting a copy of my script on my webserver 
with .phps extension and looking at it, and noticing that after the 
heredoc, all syntax highlighting stopped.

So, I guess even though HEREDOC might be more pleasing to read (imho), 
it has a nasty class of syntax error that is *very* hard to detect 
(since it is very hard to 'see' that you have whitespace after the 
token). Caveat coder.

Actually, I think I just figured out where the whitespace came from. My 
text editor has a feature, normally usefull, to do automatic indenting 
when you start a new line of code. I think it indented the cursor 4 
spaces, and I hit 'home' and typed the delimiting token, and forgot 
about the whitespace at the end (normally, whitespace is 
ignored/collapsed by the parser).

Jeff Schmidt
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