This is the first “Beginners’ Corner” article, designed to help new PHP programmers in their quest to become veteran PHP programmers. In this initial installment we’ll look at a few things which are best avoided, but for various reasons often become habits of new PHP users who do not yet know better. Many of these may become habits simply because there are so many bad examples out there to learn from, often because they are dated and PHP has moved on in a manner which obsoletes them.
<?php Tags
The first bad habit to avoid is using <? instead of <?php or <?= instead of <?php echo. While saving those few keystrokes is a temptation to all of us lazy programmers, it is a potential problem should you need to run the script on a site where the short_open_tag option is disabled. One likely reason to have it disabled is in order to avoid confusion with <?xml tags in XML documents, and as XML is much more prevalent now than it was when PHP was created, you are more likely to find such configurations in use; so just get in the habit of typing those three extra characters and saving yourself a lot of aggravation in the future.