Bill Smith wrote:Apparently, the windows version has less tolerance then the version running on my hosting service.
Not really a true case of tolerance but more a case of how differently server's can be configured to suit certain conditions.
XAMPP developers tend to configure the included components to be as near to the safest defaults as possible and to heed the component author's warnings about issues that may arise if certain settings are used.
Where as your hosting service may configure their server's to suit there own lower support request needs and for backward computability - eventually they may also have to configure their server's differently if they get too many support requests from people using more up to date methods like XML etc.
Also of course your hosting service may not yet be using PHP 5.3 - which is the PHP version in use in XAMPP 1.7.2
PHP in XAMPP is configured using the
\xampp\php\php.ini file and what you used in your code was the
short_open_tag directive which may cause conflicts and confusion for Apache when using other scripts, as described in the configuration comments of
short_open_tag at about line 214 in php.ini file of version XAMPP 1.7.2.
Please check out the php.ini section related to the
short_open_tag directive and the associated comments, which by default in XAMPP is set to
Off, hence the reason for the issue you described above.
If you still wish to use
<? instead of
<?php then simply use
shorts_open_tag = On in the php.ini file, save it and then restart Apache.
BTW, XAMPP versions prior to 1.7.2 used the
short_open_tag = On setting and so this issue you had would not have been evident.