Why do I have to declare <?php

Question

I think that I've been used to a fairly liberal policy regarding the PHP declaration in projects - I've always just used:

<? // here is my php code ?>

I just setup an nginx server using PHP-FPM under FastCGI and now it requires me to declare explicitly:

<?php // here is my php code ?>

Is there any way to change that? (Since otherwise I would have to go into my project and find/replace all of the instances where this occurs).

Answer 1

You need to enable short open tags via the php.ini configuration file. However, if you are using XML concurrently with PHP, there will be a conflict.

Just found a good article on the deprecation of short tags in PHP6.