PHP IF OR AND not working

Question

I have problems to make IF OR statement properly, in this case it does not matter if I use || or "OR".

I have now: if($email == '' || (!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)))

I get error PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function \xa0() in

if I change to if($email == '' || !filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL))

I get error PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '!' in

tried your code here http://phpfiddle.org/ .. no errors were found .. code run succesfuly — Pardeep Poria, May 12 '16 at 08:08
This function is available from 5.2.0, what version of php you are using? — Strahinja Djurić, May 12 '16 at 08:10
This feature is only available for PHP Versions (PHP 5 >= 5.2.0) according to documentation. So make sure your version is correct. http://php.net/manual/en/filter.filters.validate.php — Pardeep Poria, May 12 '16 at 08:11
PHP 5.5.16 (cli), filter validate function it self works perfectly but the IF OR statement, it doesn't matter if I have other like $sth == '' OR/|| !functionX(...)) I still get the error(s) — Diamonte, May 12 '16 at 08:11
filter_var() Returns the filtered data, or FALSE if the filter fails. There is your problem — Strahinja Djurić, May 12 '16 at 08:15
Using PHP Version 5.5.38. Not sure what filter_var() got to do with it, I don't use it.. — Konservin, Oct 24 '16 at 21:22

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:00

This error message Call to undefined function \xa0() in looks a lot like encoding types are the source of your problem. The \xA0 character is a bugger:

\xa0 is actually non-breaking space in Latin1 (ISO 8859-1), also
chr(160). You should replace it with a space. When .encode('utf-8'), it
will encode the unicode to utf-8, that means every unicode could be
represented by 1 to 4 bytes.Jun 12, 2012

from Python: Removing \xa0 from string?

The problem is you can't see it either because it's a special "whitespace" that was most probably inserted during a Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V from some strange IDE or website.

This should remove them all from your file and replace them with good whitespaces:

file_put_contents('your-script-cleaned.php', 
                  str_replace('\\x0a', 
                  ' ', 
                  file_get_contents('your-script-original.php')))

An IDE search & replace could do the trick just as well.

Hi, this guide me to right tracks, there is something weird, file works as UTF-8 but not as ISO-8859-1, I did not however even think about this because most of if not all from this project are ISO — Diamonte, May 12 '16 at 08:23
Encodings errors are the worse IMO (not so fond memories of single BOM character crashing a huge PHP deployment because of a silly IDE that went completely unnoticed during code reviews :S). — smassey, May 12 '16 at 08:27

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 12 '16 at 14:46

Your code has a non-breaking space character (\u00A0) after the ||.

Additionally PHP is stupid enough to consider that byte a viable identifier, thus it thinks

<nbsp>(!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL))

is a function call, not unlike

myfunction(!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL))

whereas

<nbsp>!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)

is a syntax error (as would be myfunction!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)), as ! cannot be used as a binary operator).

Typing such non-breaking spaces happens fairly commonly in keyboard layouts wherein you must type the pipe character | with Alt Gr, such as the standard Finnish layout that I am using. This occurs because you still have the Alt Gr pressed down while hitting the space bar; on many layouts Alt Gr + will produce a non-breaking space. (Note that I myself used non-breaking space in my answer to make the space-bar key ;)

A good editor would be able to mark such an use a syntax error, or perhaps you can configure your editor to highlight such mistakes.

PHP IF OR AND not working

2 Answers2