Why Do Single Line PHP Comments Break Page?

I apologize if this has been answered, but I haven't been able to find anything about it. I've been having trouble with a certain block of PHP code on my server and have finally realized that it doesn't like single line comments. With this code, the method get_all_articles is never called.

<?php 
    $article_class = new Articles();
    // Fetch all articles
    $articles = $article_class->get_all_articles();
?>

However, removing the comment or converting it to a block comment allows the page to render perfectly. I realize that I've already figured out what's causing the problem, but what I'm looking for is why or how I might be 开发者_高级运维able to fix it. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Maybe the formatting is getting lost on upload to where line breaks are being deleted? Try downloading the PHP file after you've uploaded it and see if the line breaks are still intact.

This can be frustrating... One time I had an if statement that would ALWAYS execute, no matter what the values were...

Started out as this, where $x was equal to 5 (I verified this with debugging)

if($x > 10);
{
    ....
}

Eventually, I had it down to this:

if(false);
{
   echo("This should never happen");
   echo("but it does!!!!!!!");
}

After much loss of hair, I realized that I had a semi-colon at the end of the if() line, therefore translating into:

if(false) 
   /*do nothing*/;

{
   //Nice block that always executes
}

The moral of this story is that while the problem you percieve is actually giving you a problem, it is not a PHP problem. Try to find out the root cause by first verifying that the actual code that is executing is EXACTLY what you typed. Re-download the file, publish with different protocol, publish as binary, check sha1sum() on files to make sure the same... Look and look and you will find it.

Let us know.