php tags

I was amazed at the response to my recent article, Should You Close Your PHP Code Tags? I didn’t think it would be controversial or cause so much debate among developers!

To recap, closing PHP tags (?>) are entirely optional if you’re coding a PHP-only file and there’s no intermingled html.

Files containing single class definitions are good candidates.

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new post with an interesting question for PHP developers that might go against how they were tought to code from their early days - should you close your PHP tags at the end of your code?

Even those with a modest grasp of PHP know that code must be enclosed within special <?php and ?> tags.

note: Alternative PHP tags

You may also be aware that PHP code can be delimited with the lesser-used <script language="php"> and </script> tags.

If short_open_tag is enabled within php.ini, you can use <? and ?> although they should be avoided if you’re embedding code within Xhtml or XML.

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