HI, Ive searched the forum and could not find a complete answer. I have just set a a new project and try to debug the home page from the browser. The cursor open on the 1st line of index.php as expected and all code lines have blue dots next to them. As I trace deeper into the programs the blue dots completely disappear but the step function goes on each line of code and I can watch variable values being set, so it seems to be working. Next I step into an include file and the blue dots are about every 10th line (approx) and even the lines with blue dots are not doing what you would expect the code to do.
OK, I know something is out of line here but what exactly. Ive tried saving the file using Save As and making sure File Format is Unix (which it was already). The File Encoding was set as WINDOWS-1252 so I left that as it was. I copied the files down from a unix server. Any clues would be really appreciated as this is driving me nuts. I have another oscommerce project and that is working fine.

HOW TO RESOLVE:

OK, I was trying to debug on a new installation of CRE Loaded 6.15(oscommerce)

Some programs had PHP code enclosed in <? ?>. Just change the <? to <?php and it will work correctly.

The offending programs in my installation were:-

/admin/index.php
/admin/xsell_products.php
popup_affiliate_help.php
popup_image.php
popup_links_help.php
popup_search_help.php
popup_wishlist_help.php
/templates/OSO6E8497TM/main_page.tpl.php

You might find others in your installation. Use Search In Files and look for the string '<? ' (without the quotes, but with a space after <?) in *.php files.

Good luck. This crap/slack coding just cost me about 8 hours of total frustration trying to find the problem.


Regards, Chris

My tech details:-
Windows XP Pro
PHPEd 5.2 build 5219
PHP 5.1.2
Apache 2.0.55
PHP Debugger 3.2.7
MySQL 4.1.7

In short, line counting/numbering is a permanent problem in php. There are many related reports posted at http://bugs.php.net and they almost all are resolved 'n' closed. But still time after time people report they see lines not in-sinc. You can easily check this yourself by throwing an error on a particular line and compare this physical line number with what php printed in the error message.

What you see a blue-dots are line-info provided by php compiler. It always count them wrong if the file encoding is Mac (0xD as line end mark), it often count them wrong if HEREDOCs are used or if #!/blah/blah/php pseudo-comment is in the first line of the script.
Although, I did never face up with any problems caused by short-tags (<?) vs full (<?php)

Good tip, thanks! I just had some serious difficulties debugging a script because stepping through it was impossible - the debugger missed quite a lot of executable lines. Now I changed the encoding, and everything is fine.

Cheers,
Jan

I like this thread. It ought to be made a sticky and a must read to all newbies