The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Reason #13 I hate PHP

I'm making sure that the various branches of “Project: Leaflet” are consistent when I notice that configuration.php, which allows one to change various settings, is not displaying at all. There are no errors, just a blank webpage. Usually, I just run the page at the command line to see what might be up:

[spc]XXXXXXXXX:~/projects/nlm/htdocs/nlm>php configuration.php 
Content-type: text/html
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.9

[spc]XXXXXXXXX:~/projects/nlm/htdocs/nlm>

Okay, nothing there. Let's see if there's an option to PHP to tell me more:

[spc]XXXXXXXXX:~/projects/nlm/htdocs/nlm>php -h
Usage: php [-q] [-h] [-s] [-v] [-i] [-f <file>] 
       php <file> [args...]
  -a               Run interactively
  -C               Do not chdir to the script's directory
  -c <path>|<file> Look for php.ini file in this directory
  -n               No php.ini file will be used
  -d foo[=bar]     Define INI entry foo with value 'bar'
  -e               Generate extended information for debugger/profiler
  -f <file>        Parse <file>.  Implies '-q'
  -h               This help
  -i               PHP information
  -l               Syntax check only (lint)
  -m               Show compiled in modules
  -q               Quiet-mode.  Suppress HTTP Header output.
  -s               Display colour syntax highlighted source.
  -v               Version number
  -w               Display source with stripped comments and whitespace.
  -z <file>        Load Zend extension <file>.

Hmm … that “lint” option seems promising. Let's try that.

[spc]XXXXXXXXX:~/projects/nlm/htdocs/nlm>php -l configuration.php 
Errors parsing configuration.php
[spc]XXXXXXXXX:~/projects/nlm/htdocs/nlm>

Well, that was spectacularly informative. Why even bother with the option if you aren't going to give any useful information?

Sigh.

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