If you need to verify the PHP code in a .php file, you can do so from a command line interface (CLI), e.g., a shell prompt using the
-l option; that's the letter "l", not the
number "1". E.g., when I tried accessing a web page I had created,
e.g., http://www.example.com/sompepage.php, I saw only a blank page. If
I examined the source code for the page in the browser from which I was
viewing the page, there was nothing there. Looking through the PHP code,
the cause of the error wasn't immediately obvious to me, but when I
issued the command php -l somepage.php on the server where
the page resided, the line that was causing the problem was identified.
$ php -l somepage.php PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '$download_url_description' (T_VARIAB LE) in somepage.php on line 79 Errors parsing somepage.php
Examining the code, I realized I had omitted a required semicolon from the prior line. When I added the semicolon at the end of the line and reran the check, I no longer saw any error messages and when I refreshed the webpage in the browser after making the update, it then displayed correctly.
