Leaving last line open without ?>

[JREAM]

I read an article on digg I think, and I don't have the link now, but it suggested leaving out the ?> at the last line of your php file (of entire site) so that you won't have any white-space error for headers. I think he suggested it to be good practice and it defers the newbies, I guess I'm a newbie lol, I have never seen this done. He said it is not required but is it still bad?

Would you consider this bad practice?

[spikeZ]

Not really bad practice as its not a requirement however I am not sure of the reasoning with the headers/white-space error.

You can add it or not - your choice. Personally I do close my blocks just as in javascript I always end my lines with a ;

[Cups]

I think the message is to be totally aware that there are no hidden spaces after your closing ?> something which I somewhat maddeningly repeated do.

[felgall]

Some open source libraries have set a coding standard of always omitting the redundant closing tag at the very end of files so as to make it obvious to everyone that there is no trailing whitespace to cause any issues. Omitting the tag in that situation will make maintnance easier since it totally eliminates one possible cause of errors.

[bhanson]

Omitting the tag makes complete sense to me. It serves no purpose.

Zend Framework does this.

[felgall]

Omitting the tag makes complete sense to me. It serves no purpose.

Zend Framework does this.

It is actually a part of the Zend framework coding standards that the tag MUST be omitted.

[Stormrider]

It doesn't make a difference to me, but personally I always keep it in. I've never really had any trouble making sure there is no white space after it (and in fact, have never had any problems caused by it), it isn't difficult to check

[risoknop]

I am used to omitting the closing tag from some PHP frameworks I have tried. Most of them recommend to omit it.

[JREAM]

Im kind of suprised that this is a good thing, but it does make sense. It's a strange thing I would have only heard from someone else to actually start doing.

I don't think you'd find this in a book anywhere, or has anyone?

[silentcollision]

Article: http://www.yongfook.com/items/view/8...lopment-tricks

6) Leave off the last ?> in php-only files

Shock horror, you don’t need to close your php tags in a php-only file. The reason you might not want to is because:

* It makes you look cool and dangerous to people who don’t know this tip. Kind of like the geek equivalent of smoking in front of your 10-year old cousin.
* It prevents accidental whitespace from being output by your php file
* If you add up the time you save by not typing those two characters in each file of every project you work on from now until you are dead, you’ll find that you’ll literally save valuable minutes of your life.

[cranial-bore]

I leave it off, because I used to add it, and I like to mix things up. Living on the edge.
Doesn't hurt to have a procedure which will protect against white space issues from PHP only files.

[Raju Gautam]

I don't say that it is bad practice but I have NEVER worked omitting closing tags yet in my experience and I don't think we have to follow the standard only because of not having the header sent error.

[UFTimmy]

I can see the benefit of it, but I don't.

I use a whitespace addon that trims whitespace that isn't needet every time I save.

[felgall]

I don't say that it is bad practice but I have NEVER worked omitting closing tags yet in my experience and I don't think we have to follow the standard only because of not having the header sent error.

It isn't a general standard. Whether you include the closing ?> or not at the end of the file is up to you unless you are working on a project which dictates the standard one way or the other.

[imaginethis]

mm I don't see how you can accidentally leave a whitespace in a file. I never have but that my just be because of the way that a code. I tend to open and close of a code block before defining it further so I rarely run into such problems.

[crmalibu]

A drawback to doing this is if you one day want to merge the source of all or some files(maybe for performance or distribution reasons), you will need additional logic instead of just using a quick shell command which appends the contents of one file to another.

However, I usually omit the end tag.

[AnthonySterling]

I personally find it a little 'hacky' to omit the tag, after all, the closing tag is there to close is it not?

I do find it strange though, to compensate for poor coding (erroneous white space), you purposely implement yet more poor coding.

The mind boggles.

[felgall]

mm I don't see how you can accidentally leave a whitespace in a file. I never have but that my just be because of the way that a code. I tend to open and close of a code block before defining it further so I rarely run into such problems.

You just need to accidentally touch the spacebar or enter key and if your editor doesn't show whitespace you will not know it is there until it breaks something.

Really easy to position the cursor using the mouse and not tralise that there is a space or linefeed following it as well.

When you do get such an error it can take ages to find the cause since you can't see the character causing the error.

[QMonkey]

I personally find it a little 'hacky' to omit the tag, after all, the closing tag is there to close is it not?

I used to feel that way but the end of the file will also act as the close. Similar to leaving out mysql_close()

Consider this. The last line of the file is HTML. Do you feel the need to have
<?php
?>
to "close" the php file?

[MarkDRussell]

Seems weird to leave it off at first, but why not avoid extra whitespace where possible, eh? Sounds logical to me.

[Stormrider]

My editor strips all whitespace from the end of a line on save, and puts line numbers next to every line in the file. It is very easy for me to see any extra whitespace I might have, and remove it.

[felgall]

My editor strips all whitespace from the end of a line on save, and puts line numbers next to every line in the file. It is very easy for me to see any extra whitespace I might have, and remove it.

Some editors do that and some don't. When you have big projects such as Zend where lots of different people are working on it some will be using editors that don't and if they added the ?> and left any whitespace after it then that could potentially stop the script working. Since finding which of their tens of thousands of files has the unwanted blank would take a significant amount of time they set a standard of never including ?> at the end of any file.

If it is a small project group with everyone using a browser that strips the trailing whitespace then there is no problem setting the standard to say that everyone working on that project must include it.

Different standards for different situations. If you ever work on Zend you will be required to omit the ?> because it is forbidden to include it in their files.

[Raju Gautam]

It isn't a general standard. Whether you include the closing ?> or not at the end of the file is up to you unless you are working on a project which dictates the standard one way or the other.

I am talking about this particular standard not other. So until I go with some frameworks that strictly follow this (particular this) standard, I don't think this is such important standard for any security issues..

[risoknop]

In files that contain only PHP code, never include the closing tag. It can lead to whitespace being unexpectedly injected into the output and cause headers to be sent prematurely.

Source: http://framework.maintainable.com/st..._standards.php

This seems to be the explanation of most PHP frameworks why they don't include closing tags.

[Daniel0]

I wouldn't exactly call it bad practice to include the closing tag, so I voted neutral. I do not include it myself though as I usually code using ZF which requires that it isn't there. Since I started using ZF I've always done that for the reasons stated.