Blank page because of an echo

[naiani]

Hi everyone.
I've been having some problems with a PHP implementation here. I have to use a .txt file as a database for the Updates section of this website. I already found a way of doing it, but I still haven't figure out a way of passing the id of the news the user is clicking to the page that is loaded when you click the link More >>.

I thought this was right:

echo "<li><strong>" . $story[1] . "</strong> - " . $story[2] . ". <a href=\"internal/news.php?id=".story[0]."\">More &gt;&gt;</a></li>"; 

It works perfectly when I don't try to pass the id to the link. But whenever I try to include it, it stops working and gives me a blank page, what I learned that occurs when there's an error in the code. So where is the error? I can't see a reason for it to not work.

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EDIT: I forgot to say that I posted the link for the .html page so you can see something similar to what I want to achieve. To see what's happening with the .php, just click the link and then change the extension from .html to .php.

[boogyman]

i dont see anything wrong per the code that you posted, but do you have access to the error being given?

[naiani]

I didn't have access to the error. I even tried to check the parsed source code (according to some goggled info, it should contain the error message), but nothing, it was literally a blank page.
But I tried a new approach and it works now. I'm using list() = explode(); to separate the content into distinct vars ($id,$date,$title) and then use these vars in the echo. I don't know why, but apparently this was happening because I was using $story[0] to pass the id to the link in the echo. Why isn't it possible?

[boogyman]

yes but if there is a blank page then a php error is generated.. i was asking if you had access to the php error log to let us know what the fatal error was.

[james438]

$data="<li><strong>";
$data .= "$story[1]" ;
$data .= "</strong> - ";
$data .= "$story[2]" ;
$data .= "<a href=\"internal/news.php?id=\"";
$data .= "story[0].\'\'>More &gt;&gt;</a></li>";
echo "$data";

I'm a sloppy coder, but this should work.

EDIT: Actually, I tested it and it worked.

[naiani]

yes but if there is a blank page then a php error is generated.. i was asking if you had access to the php error log to let us know what the fatal error was.

No, I don't. I don't have access to any kind of "internal" aspects/features of the server.

[tech_support]

Try adding error_reporting(E_ALL); right under <?php...

[alexjewell]

And try wrapping your echoed code in single quotes so you don't have to slash the quotes, like so:

echo '<a href="something.html">Sample "quotes"</a>'; 

It makes the code simple and makes it easier to spot mistakes.

[boogyman]

And try wrapping your echoed code in single quotes so you don't have to slash the quotes, like so:

echo '<a href="something.html">Sample "quotes"</a>'; 

It makes the code simple and makes it easier to spot mistakes.

also when you are parsing text you should break out of php as much as possible

[alexjewell]

Yeah, for example, say if you have an if statement, you could do this and not even use echo:

<?php if(this){ ?>
<!-- HTML HERE -->
<?php } ?>

But we're getting off-subject a bit.