Tutorials

Debugging: A Beginner's guide

by Ben Smithers on Jun 9, 2008 5:47:39 PM

Views: 25997

Syntax Errors -- Debugging

Computers are stupid. You can quite easily understand something with a missing piece of punctuation, but computers? They throw their teddies out the pram. You might, for instance, see this:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_VARIABLE in C:\wamp\www\phpfreaks.php on line 3

Now, when something's unexpected, it means just that. However, it does not always mean that it's not required. For example, the above error message was generated with this code:

The unexpected element of the above is $bar. But we wanted to define $bar, that's not unexpected. What is unexpected is the lack of semi-colon on the previous line. This leads us to one important aspect of finding and fixing errors: check the previous lines.

Other common causes of syntax errors are:

  • Unclosed quotes
  • Missing or Extra parentheses (for example, with if statements)
  • Unclosed braces -- more on this later

One thing that will help you avoid making syntax errors is the use of a good editor with syntax highlighting. This will make things such as unclosed quotes very obvious.

We'll move onto fatal errors, warnings and notices on page 4.

Comments

One small note worth adding: setting display_errors at runtime (ini_set()) won't work if the script contains fatal errors (like a parse error) because it will never get executed.

1. philipolson on Jun 10, 2008 2:09:56 PM

That's a good point there. I'll add a note in to that effect.

2. Ben Smithers on Jun 10, 2008 5:13:00 PM

You can also set error reporting in the .htaccess file if you have access to that and not your php.ini file. Here's what you need to put in the .htaccess file

php_flag display_errors on
php_value error_reporting 2047

// Or whatever error reporting level you want to use - I use 2047.

3. anthropos9 on Jun 10, 2008 6:55:58 PM

Re comment #1: Did you check that what you said is true? Setting it at runtine does work (providing you do it before any errors occur).

4. Daniel Egeberg on Jun 11, 2008 12:54:49 AM

With a syntax error Daniel? Not in my tests. With error_reporting turned off, this prodces a blank page:

5. Ben Smithers on Jun 11, 2008 1:40:02 AM

Hmm... I tested using

That does not output any errors. I just figured it would be the same type of fatal error as a syntax error would.

6. Daniel Egeberg on Jun 11, 2008 2:39:08 AM

Yeah, but then i think that makes sense. If there's a parse error, then the PHP engine wont be able make sense of the code; so it wont be able to understand that it's supposed to make a modification to the php.ini. Whereas with something like a fatal error for an undefined function, PHP can understand what it's being asked to do, just can't do it.

Also; valid point regarding .htaccess anthopos9. I'm not sure i'll add it in however, as it might just confuse the issue.

7. Ben Smithers on Jun 11, 2008 7:22:07 AM

Ben, with the htaccess thing... "php_flag display_errors on
php_value error_reporting 2047"

Right now theres nothing in the htaccess file but it writes errors to "error_log".
If I added in what you said would it fix it?

8. Stephen on Jun 15, 2008 8:31:49 PM

Well, it would turn turn display_errors On and it would set your error_reporting to 2047 which is all errors except recoverable. So if that's what you meant by 'fix it' then yes, i guess it would.

You might need to clarify, however.

9. Ben Smithers on Jun 16, 2008 3:51:06 PM

I'm new to php and I am reading PHP 5 for Dummies, I'm at chapter 3 creating you first PHP script. The script I'm using is
<html>
<head><title>Hello World Script</title></head>
<body>
<?php
echo “<p>Hello World!</p>”
?>
</body>
</html>
I saved it as helloworld.php on my localhost and even on my web server and I keep getting the same message:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '>' in C:\wamp\www\Test\helloworld.php on line 5
I have no idea whats wrong with it as I have just copied and pasted from the ebook!!
Please could someone help as I can't work it out?

10. Bleakers on Jun 19, 2008 8:51:48 AM

It appears you're using some sort of curly quotes instead of the regular straight ones. It's probably printed like that in your ebook. Try to type it manually and run it again.

11. Daniel Egeberg on Jun 19, 2008 1:17:22 PM

Thank you very much Daniel. That has fix the problem.

12. Bleakers on Jun 20, 2008 6:40:16 AM

As an addendum to the section on logic errors, an extremely handy line of code for figuring out what variables have what values (without having to exhaustively echo them) is the following:

This will exit the script - you can just as easily use echo. As a warning, it only works within the scope from which it is called (ie. from within functions only the local scope is returned), and from the global scope, you'll get all superglobals as well. This can flood you with data that you don't need - in this case, feel free to trim it down by specifying particular arrays in place of get_defined_vars().

13. akitchin on Aug 21, 2008 6:12:02 PM
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