I seem to be getting a LOT of parse errors with my php scripts. there are two things they have in common:
1. they are downloaded and uploaded without modifying them.
2. they all seem to have "unexpected $end"
e.g
that example for webinstall.php, a script used to install SMF. I know that trap17 provides fantastico to install SMF, but I want to install SMF1.1RC3 to use with joomla-smf, which fantastico doesn't support.
if I upload and install SMF the old fashioned way, I get a similar message. I do not modify my php scripts before uploading. If other people can use them fine, why can't I?
Does it have something to do with an old version of php on the trap17 servers?
Thanks in advance for any help!

I am running SMF 1.1 RC3. And it was upgraded from 1.0 version. Both install and upgrade were done over FTP upload (bypassing Fantastico!). And they work just fine.

I have added few mods for the board so they too are working just fine.

Before we go any further, how are you uploading to your hosting space? Have you unzip the whole thing in your local harddrive and uploading one by one style file upload? Or are you uploading the whole zip file and letting cPanel to unzip it? Which FTP software, if any, are you using and have you set "auto detection" for file types? -- this is because some SMF files need to be uploaded in BINARY mode and some in ASCII mode.

thanks for your help, BuffaloHELP, i read the FAQ on trap17 and saw that you didn't exactly support hosting of .zip files so I thought that cPanel would not let me unzip files. how wrong I was. and it wasn't just SMF board that I was getting parse errors on. I dropped the drupal part of my site cos i kept getting these parse errors. it seems as though the parse errors came from my FTP client, FireFTP (a firefox extension). I uploaded them as .zip and let cPanel unzip them and it worked just fine.

As a question, how would uploading a file in different modes affect the contents of a file? Don't the contents of files stay the same no matter how it gets sent to the server?

This post has been edited by detportal: Dec 3 2006, 09:19 AM

Some FTP programs are better than others when distinguishing from binary mode and ASCII mode. Since I am not using FireFTP I am going to make the following conclusion.

The actual software client, such as WsPro, SmartFTP, CuteFTP, FireZilla are designed to either automatically detect the file type or force to certain transfer mode.

But as far as I can tell, FireFTP lacks this capability and it forces to be in ASCII mode at all times. This is bad when it reads "\n" or a blank return as "end of line" which then "re-writes" as "END", the very same error you received.

In Binary mode, it transfers character by character. This method takes longer when uploading but since it is in Binary mode (zeros and ones) it does not "re-write" anything other than the original character.

When you visit some script support forum, they actually tell you which files to upload in Binary mode and which files in ASCII mode. This is also known as UTF-8 mode (auto, force, never).

Regarding not hosting ZIP files pertains to illegal files, such as cracks and keygens, MP3, unlicensed software, expletive materials and pictures. SMF is free license thus you can upload it as ZIP and use cPanel to extract.

For more information and discussion on cPanel ZIP and UNZIP, please look through our Tutorial section.

Topic resolved and closed.

Since this topic also deals with FireFTP (which I think it stinks! ) if you would like to continue this topic please PM a moderator.