Edit report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=61182&edit=1
ID: 61182
User updated by: tom at tomwardrop dot com
Reported by: tom at tomwardrop dot com
Summary: Assume Opening PHP Tag
Status: Open
Type: Feature/Change Request
Package: *Configuration Issues
PHP Version: 5.4.0RC8
Block user comment: N
Private report: N
New Comment:
Are there not other directives that can break a lot of code? Remember, this
would default to off. I don't see why as a server owner, I should have this
option made unavailable purely because it can break other code. If you wanted
to
write code that worked regardless of this setting, you could do something like:
<?php
init_set('implicit_open_tag', false)
?>
Of course, for that to work then implicit_open_tag is On, the parser would have
to ignore the "<?php". The rule could be that if <?php is the first non-
whitespace sequence encountered in the file, then it's ignored.
'optional_open_tag' may therefore be a more appropriate name for this setting.
Except for legacy templates which may start with something other than <?php,
this would allow for cross-environment code. Any such template code that
breaks,
would break in a manner no different to how new features like namespaces break
in older version of PHP.
A new tag could be introduced: "<?php>". This would be shorthand for opening
and
closing a php tag, and should be placed at the top of any template file that
has
the requirement to work regardless of whether the opening tag is optional.
I hope this idea isn't dismissed on the grounds that it's difficult to
implement, because I think it's workable. Having optional opening tags would no
doubt be a step in the right direction for PHP, and I'm sure that if you didn't
have backwards compatible to be concerned about, you'd probably make opening
tags implicit with no option to make it otherwise. As I said earlier, the
decision to make the opening tag explicit was desirable at the time PHP was
conceived, but I believe it's one of those legacy decisions that needs to be re-
evaluated.
Previous Comments:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[2012-02-25 08:50:31] ras...@php.net
So this would basically be a "break all existing code" .ini switch? I don't
think
that is a good idea.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[2012-02-25 08:37:03] tom at tomwardrop dot com
Description:
------------
PHP is probably the only language I know which requires an opening tag (i.e <?
php). It's one of those things with PHP that people rarely question. While PHP
is a rather unique programming language in that it's basically a templating
engine at its core, I feel that requiring the opening <?php is not catering to
the majority of the use cases. Instead, I'd rather PHP assume that the file
being executed has PHP from line 1 which is most commonly the case. In the less
common scenario where PHP is not the first text encountered, the user would
need
to close the assumed PHP execution block with a ?>.
In the early days, when web pages were mostly static, and PHP was used to add
dynamic elements, it made sense to require an opening tag to drop-into PHP
execution. These days however, the opposite is more often the case. You
normally
have a complete PHP web application, into which HTML and other static text is
inject, rather than injecting dynamic elements into static web pages.
What I'd like to see is a new directive added to php.ini. Call it what you
want,
e.g. assume_open_tag or omit_open_tag.
This would require a few changes in coding practice. For example, if
omit_open_tag is On, then the behaviour of the include() and require()
constructs will change. They too will assume the files being required contain
PHP from line 1. Programmer will not longer be able to use include() and
require() to load file contents, instead the programmer would have to use
file_get_contents or some other alternative, though this would arguably a good
thing, as using require() and include() to load and output non-php could be
vulnerability, hence it's already bad practice to use include/require() to load
non-PHP files.
I think this change would be consistant with some of the changes made in 5.4
which demonstrates PHP embracing modern programming idioms from other
languages.
Ideally, I'd like this to become the default behaviour of PHP, though obviously
for at least the first major release, it would of course be defaulted to Off.
Thoughts?
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