PHP4 to PHP5

PHP
1

I recently changed from PHP4 to 5. Yeah, I know, took me long enough. Anyway, its on a shared host and they did the change for me. Unfortunately, the PHP stuff I wrote, doesn’t work anymore. I haven’t done anything with PHP in a long time. I’m curious what may have changed that I need to fix my broken pages.

The pages are relatively simple. They call on a MySQL DB for the content and then put that content on the page after you click a link. Currently, I don’t get any errors, but the page doesn’t change when I click on a link to show the content.

I seem to remember something about needing to declare variables when the new PHP came out and I hadn’t done that so I never bothered to update anything.

Any tips would be great

Thanks

Jason

2

Did you do stuff like $name instead of $_GET[‘name’]? And you don’t get any errors probably because the display or which are turned off. Look for an error log in the same location as the file.

3

Just to clarify Logic’s post - you shouldn’t use $name (if you are). You should be using $_GET[‘name’] to get values from the URI.

That’s what he meant, but to someone who doesn’t know otherwise it may sound a little ambiguous.

4

Yes, I just used things like $name. What does $_GET[‘name’] do for me?

Thanks

Jason

5

One of the PHP documentation’s appendices addresses migrating from PHP 4 to 5.

Without seeing any of your code, though, it’s hard to figure out what your exact problem is.

6

Basically, using $name instead of $_GET[‘name’] doesn’t work any more. It was a setting called ‘Register Globals’ - there are many articles about it if you wish to look into it further.

But for a quick overview, register globals automatically put values from the superglobal arrays ($_GET, $_POST etc) into the variable namespace - so rather than $_GET[‘something’], people could just use $something.

However, this means that people can practically insert their own values for your variables in scripts - and for security and integrity reasons, register globals was deprecated and is now fully removed.

So, if you want to get values from the url, use $_GET[‘name’], and $_POST[‘name’] for posted variables.

7

I will give that a try, thanks so much for the information

Jason

8

That did the trick. I went back and reread Kevin’s tutorial about doing PHP and MySQL web sites, where I learned how to do this, and it showed that I needed to add that for my variables. I don’t think it had that back when I read it the first time.

Thank you so much for your help.

Jason