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Subject: Consider only ignoring newlines for final ?> in a file
From: ajf@ajf.me (Andrea Faulds)

Hi everyone,

This is the tiniest of issues, but it's bugged me for a long time and 
makes the HTML produced by PHP code less readable than it out to be. 
Specifically, PHP ignores a newline immediately following a ?> tag. The 
reason for this is, from what I recall, to prevent issues where 
whitespace at the end of a PHP file is echoed before headers can be 
sent. On UNIX in particular, all text files (should) end in a newline, 
so this is a reasonable and necessary feature.

However, for ?> tags anywhere that aren't right at the end of the file, 
this is just a nuisance that makes for messy output. For example, HTML 
output that should look like:

<table>
     <tr>
        <td>foo</td>
        <td>bar</td>
     </tr>
</table>

May instead end up looking something like:

<table>    <tr>
        <td>foo</td>       <td>bar</td>
     </tr></table>

Of course, HTML doesn't matter so much, it'll render the same to the 
end-user. However, for outputting e.g. plain text, newlines can be 
significant, and so you have to insert an ugly and surprising extra 
newline following a tag.

Would anyone object to me changing how PHP handles this so that only the 
final ?> tag consumes its following newline, and only at the end of the 
file?

Thanks!
-- 
Andrea Faulds
https://ajf.me/