A URL is valid PHP code?!

I accidentally pasted a URL into my code, and it worked?!

You can put a link straight into your PHP code, and it’ll be fine, even if it’s not in a comment! How?!

• https: is a label for a goto statement, a syntax we seldom use in modern PHP
• // and everything after it is treated as a comment, so is ignored and not actually parsed

It’s pretty dumb in hindsight, but it’s a fun little quirk that got me to think about how my code wasn’t breaking when I expected a fatal error for my bad syntax. I wouldn’t ever intentionally use this quirk over a real comment, but it’s interesting to know that it’s possible.

One thing to note is that you can only define a single “goto label” of a given name defined in the current scope, so if you have multiple URLs in your code, you can only have one https, one http and so on unless they’re in different files/functions.

<?php

// The first time it's absolutely fine:
https://liamhammett.com

// The second time, you get a fatal error:
https://example.com