Old code just doesn’t seem to work on PHP 5.3

On 01.19.10, In PHP, by Tim Groeneveld

Someone came to me yesterday and asked me to have a quick look at his PHP, because his autoloaders were no longer working after he upgraded to PHP 5.3.

Warning: Illegal offset type in isset or empty in /var/www/crazycode.ws/wp-includes/query.php on line 1715

Someone came to me yesterday and asked me to have a quick look at his PHP, because his autoloaders were no longer working after he upgraded to PHP 5.3. Here is an example of what he had:

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<?
echo 'PHP Version: ' . phpversion() . '</br>';

function __autoload($classname)
{
echo 'Loading class: ' . $classname . '</br>';
eval("class $classname {
function __construct()
{
echo '$classname';
}
}");
}

$foo = new Foo();
?>

Now, the only reason (after 30 minutes of staring through almost 15 files) why his code was not working was because he was using short tags. As soon as the first line was changed to:

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<?php

everything magically just started working once again.

So let this be a reminder: when php.ini tells you that something is going to be deprecated, please, pretty please don’t go and ignore it!

Tim Groeneveld

Tim Groeneveld is a code monkey specialising in PHP, MySQL and web server load balancing/clustering. Currently working at Digital Pacific, he spends his days either fixing up other peoples issues or madly hacking away at this weeks project. Nothing tickles Tim more then running the latest version of all his favorite software. When not working, Tim is sitting at home playing with "The Beast".

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