Title: [Plugin: WP-Syntax] Ugly errors in PHP 5.3
Last modified: August 19, 2016

---

# [Plugin: WP-Syntax] Ugly errors in PHP 5.3

 *  [KevBurnsJr](https://wordpress.org/support/users/kevburnsjr/)
 * (@kevburnsjr)
 * [16 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wp-syntax-ugly-errors-in-php-53/)
 * WP-Syntax v0.9.3
 * PHP syntax highlighting throws some really deep errors if you give it a complex
   piece of code in a PHP 5.3 environment.
 * I updated my dev environment to PHP 5.3 and started browsing around, but my blog’s
   homepage would not display. I could use the wp-admin interface just fine, but
   the blog’s homepage would begin rendering and then Firefox would flick to a blank“
   Connection Interrupted” error screen.
 * The Apache error log reads only :
 *     ```
       [Mon Jul 06 20:05:35 2009] [notice] Parent: child process exited with status 3221225477 -- Restarting.
       ```
   
 * Turns out this error message is extremely obtuse. After mucking with my environment
   as much as possible, I decided to jump into the WordPress code to see if I could
   track down the error.
 * The offending markup was a single blog post containing a commented-out piece 
   of **escaped JSON** from an exemplary GitHub webhook payload.
 * This code crashes Apache:
 *     ```
       <pre lang="php" ><?php
       // $sample_payload_a = "{\"after\": \"0e2a75ac4434d110c3a1f03d53dda93f73bfcda9\", \"ref\": \"refs\/heads\/master\", \"commits\": [{\"added\": [], \"removed\": [], \"url\": \"http:\/\/github.com\/weareus\/core\/commit\/0e2a75ac4434d110c3a1f03d53dda93f73bfcda9\", \"modified\": [\"app\/views\/content\/_table.tpl.php\", \"app\/views\/question\/_table.tpl.php\"], \"timestamp\": \"2009-03-19T19:52:51-07:00\", \"message\": \"# Removing inaccurate table summaries\", \"author\": {\"name\": \"KevBurnsJr\", \"email\": \"kevburnsjr\"}, \"id\": \"0e2a75ac4434d110c3a1f03c53dda93f73bfcda9\"}], \"repository\": {\"owner\": {\"name\": \"weareus\", \"email\": \"info\"}, \"description\": \"\", \"name\": \"core\", \"private\": true, \"forks\": 0, \"url\": \"http:\/\/github.com\/weareus\/core\", \"fork\": false, \"watchers\": 4, \"homepage\": \"http:\/\/weare.us\"}, \"before\": \"cd2fe2ef3c6f6aac4cabf34d6201635ada6d8033\"}";
       // $sample_payload_b = "{\"after\": \"0e2a75ac4434d110c3a1f03c53dda93f73bfcda9\", \"ref\": \"refs\/heads\/master\", \"commits\": [{\"added\": [], \"removed\": [], \"url\": \"http:\/\/github.com\/weareus\/core\/commit\/0e2a75ac4434d110c3a1f03c53dda93f73bfcda9\", \"modified\": [\"app\/views\/content\/_table.tpl.php\", \"app\/views\/question\/_table.tpl.php\"], \"timestamp\": \"2009-03-19T19:52:51-07:00\", \"message\": \"Removing inaccurate table summaries\", \"author\": {\"name\": \"KevBurnsJr\", \"email\": \"kevburnsjr\"}, \"id\": \"0e2a75ac4434d110c3a1f03c53dda93f73bfcda9\"}], \"repository\": {\"owner\": {\"name\": \"weareus\", \"email\": \"info\"}, \"description\": \"\", \"name\": \"core\", \"private\": true, \"forks\": 0, \"url\": \"http:\/\/github.com\/weareus\/core\", \"fork\": false, \"watchers\": 4, \"homepage\": \"http:\/\/weare.us\"}, \"before\": \"cd2fe2ef3c6f6aac4cabf34d6201635ada6d8033\"}";
           die('no data');
       ?></pre>
       ```
   
 * This code works fine :
 *     ```
       <pre lang="php" ><?php
           die('no data');
       ?></pre>
       ```
   
 * My fix for now is just to remove the offending piece of code from the post.
 * Windows XP SP3
    PHP 5.3 Apache 2.2.x MySQL 5.1
 * This is a rather obscure error, but I figured it might at least be helpful to
   document it here as a known issue.

The topic ‘[Plugin: WP-Syntax] Ugly errors in PHP 5.3’ is closed to new replies.

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 0 replies
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [KevBurnsJr](https://wordpress.org/support/users/kevburnsjr/)
 * Last activity: [16 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wp-syntax-ugly-errors-in-php-53/)
 * Status: not resolved

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