Why would one omit the close tag?

The reason you should leave off the php closing tag (?>) is so that the programmer doesn't accidentally send extra newline chars.

The reason you shouldn't leave off the php closing tag is because it causes an imbalance in the php tags and any programmer with half a mind can remember to not add extra white-space.

So for your question:

Is there another good reason to skip the ending php tag?

No, there isn't another good reason to skip the ending php tags.

I will finish with some arguments for not bothering with the closing tag:

People are always able to make mistakes, no matter how smart they are. Adhering to a practice that reduces the number of possible mistakes is (IMHO) a good idea.

PHP is not XML. PHP doesn't need to adhere to XMLs strict standards to be well written and functional. If a missing closing tag annoys you, you're allowed to use a closing tag, it's not a set-in-stone rule one way or the other.

3 years ago

Sending headers earlier than the normal course may have far reaching consequences. Below are just a few of them that happened to come to my mind at the moment:

While current PHP releases may have output buffering on, the actual production servers you will be deploying your code on are far more important than any development or testing machines. And they do not always tend to follow latest PHP trends immediately.

You may have headaches over inexplicable functionality loss. Say, you are implementing some kind payment gateway, and redirect user to a specific URL after successful confirmation by the payment processor. If some kind of PHP error, even a warning, or an excess line ending happens, the payment may remain unprocessed and the user may still seem unbilled. This is also one of the reasons why needless redirection is evil and if redirection is to be used, it must be used with caution.

You may get "Page loading canceled" type of errors in Internet Explorer, even in the most recent versions. This is because an AJAX response/json include contains something that it shouldn't contain, because of the excess line endings in some PHP files.

If you have some file downloads in your app, they can break too, because of this. And you may not notice it, even after years, since the specific breaking habit of a download depends on the server, the browser, the type and content of the file .

3 years ago

According to the docs, it's preferable to omit the closing tag if it's at the end of the file for the following reason:

If a file is pure PHP code, it is preferable to omit the PHP closing tag at the end of the file. This prevents accidental whitespace or new lines being added after the PHP closing tag, which may cause unwanted effects because PHP will start output buffering when there is no intention from the programmer to send any output at that point in the script.

3 years ago