XAMPP echoing part of my PHP code - php

Question

I'm working within the XAMPP environment on a windows 7 64-bit machine. I have Apache 2.4 service installed. The issue I'm having has baffled me for about a day now.
My php files have all executed as expected up to this point. Recently, I've created a file which begins with the following:
function get_web_page($url,$attempt=1){
if($attempt <4){
$options = array(
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true, // return web page
CURLOPT_HEADER => false, // don't return headers
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true, // follow redirects
CURLOPT_ENCODING => "", // handle all encodings
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20120427 Firefox/15.0a1", // who am i
CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER => true, // set referer on redirect
CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 30, // timeout on connect
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 30, // timeout on response
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10, // stop after 10 redirects
);
$ch = curl_init( $url );
curl_setopt_array( $ch, $options );
$content = curl_exec( $ch );
$err = curl_errno( $ch );
$errmsg = curl_error( $ch );
$header = curl_getinfo( $ch );
curl_close( $ch );
if($err == 0){
return $content;
}else{
return get_web_page( $url, $attempt + 1 );
}
}else{
return FALSE;
}
}
A simple function to retrieve a web page, and it doesn't echo anything, either.
But when I visit this page in a browser (which at this point ONLY defines a function and nothing else), it prints to the page everything following the first instance of "=>" (without quotes). I don't understand why this is. All of my other php files in the same directory behave as expected.
Please help me understand why this is happening and what steps I should take to resolve it.

Answer 1

Look at the source of the page given to your browser and you'll probably see the entire php source in plaintext. It's only rendering what's after the first => because that's likely the first closing > it finds after the opening < in <?php. The first part doesn't render because your browser thinks it's inside some strange HTML tag.
Check your apache config, because it's not routing requests for *.php pages through the PHP interpreter.