5th December 2008 - 5 minutes read time
PHP is a powerful tool, but if you create any piece of software there are one or two things that you should never rely on.
A good example is using PHP short tags. This is a short hand way of stating that this block are to be parsed as PHP. This is an example of a normal tag.
<?php echo 'Hello World'; >
Here is the same code using short tags.
<? echo 'Hello World'; >
Another alternative, if you just want to print the output of a variable, is to use the following.
<?='Hello World'; >
The short tags setting can be turned on or off in the php.ini file. If you create an application that relies on these short tags then you will find that on some systems the short tags setting is turned off, which means that your software will simply not work.