PHP5 / IIS7 not parsing includes

[marijun]

Hi!  I'm having a rather strange problem, and I'm not very familiar with IIS7 so I'm not sure how to fix it.

 

I've installed PHP as a FastCGI module on IIS 7, and everything seems to be fine except for the fact that it refuses to parse included files.

 

For example, this bit of code:

<?php
require_once('config.php');
phpinfo();
?>

prints config.php as text and does not parse it, however, the phpinfo() function does what it is supposed to and no errors are generated.

 

My include_path is set correctly, as it does indeed find the config.php file - it just won't parse it.

 

I've been wracking my brain on this all weekend, any insight would be greatly appreciated!

[PFMaBiSmAd]

Show us the opening php tags that are being used in config.php

[marijun]

Boy is my face red...I was using '<?' and not '<?php'.  (well it worked on the dev server  ) Guess I skipped over that setting in the production server installation.  Thanks!

[PFMaBiSmAd]

Don't use <? (ever).

 

You got caught by the lazy-way short open tag. You won't always be on a server where you can change the setting that allows <? to work and from php.net -

; NOTE: Using short tags should be avoided when developing applications or

; libraries that are meant for redistribution, or deployment on PHP

; servers which are not under your control, because short tags may not

; be supported on the target server. For portable, redistributable code,

; be sure not to use short tags.

 

The short open tags were originally added as a way to save a little typing time, but as you just discovered they have wasted several orders of magnitude more time then they ever saved in typing time.