What could cause random errors to occur in php parsing? - php

Question

Sorry that the context is so vague but this problem is very vague. I will try to convey the experience so far.
This is the code I am editing and it is on line 133:
$log->log('info', 'total_data: ' . count( $result->data ) );
The above code worked, when I changed the string to 'total_results' it caused a syntax error:
$log->log('info', 'total_results: ' . count( $result->data ) );
The error randomly changes whenever any characters change. For example the above code made this error
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ']' in /web/api.php on line 180
FYI: there are only 179 lines in this file.
If I remove one letter from the string:
$log->log('info', 'total_result: ' . count( $result->data ) );
The above error changes to:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ']' in /web/api.php on line 181
If I keep removing one letter at a time and refreshing the line number keeps incrementing.
Sometimes if I delete the line, save, refresh, paste it back in, save, refresh it will then work. Sometimes if I add more characters to the string it will work. This must be something on a level beyond syntax errors because the same code will work at a later time. I have tried to restart apache2 but that does not fix anything, it usually displays a different random error. I cannot see any consistency with the error messages. The one consistent thing seems to be that as long as nothing changes the error will stay the same.
Here are other error messages I have seen while trying to find some consistencies:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected 'DirectMap4k' (T_STRING) in /web/api.php on line 180
Again I deleted one line, saved, refreshed, put that line back, saved, refreshed and then it worked.
logging.php
<?php
class logger {
protected $file = null;
protected $log_level = 3;
protected $_date_fmt = 'Y-m-d H:i:s.u';
protected $_levels = [ 'CRITICAL' => 0,
'ERROR' => 1,
'WARNING' => 2,
'INFO' => 3,
'DEBUG' => 4,
'TRACE' => 5,
'TRACE1' => 6,
'TRACE2' => 7 ];
function __construct( $name = 'Anonymous',
$file = 'application.log' )
{
$this->name = $name;
$this->filename = $file;
// check if file exists before fopen creates the file
$new_file = ! file_exists( $file );
// die if file is not writable
if( ! ( $new_file or is_writable( $file ) )) {
die( "logger class cannot write to file: <b>" . $file . "</b>" );
}
$this->file = fopen( $file, 'a' );
if( $new_file ) {
$this->write( "<"."?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed'); ?".">\n\n" );
}
}
public function log( $level, $message )
{
if( $this->_levels[ strtoupper( $level ) ] > $this->log_level ) {
// do not log
return;
}
list( $usec, $sec ) = explode( ' ', microtime() );
$datetime = sprintf( '%s.%03d',
date("Y-m-d H:i:s", $sec),
floor($usec * 1000) );
$write = sprintf( '%s - %8.8s : %s',
$datetime,
strtolower( $level ),
$message );
$this->write( $write . "\n" );
}
private function write( $message )
{
fwrite( $this->file, $message );
}
function __destruct()
{
if( $this->file ) {
fclose( $this->file );
}
}
}
?>

Answer 1

The problem ended up being with Vagrant file synching using HGFS. The files are actually on the host machine and they were not being accurately synchronized. To avoid the random errors, I have resorted to never sharing development code over HGFS.