Invalid body indentation level (expecting an indentation level of at least 4)

Question

I just upgraded to PHP 7.3 and I\'m getting this error:

Invalid body indentation level (expecting an indentation level of at least 4)

Here is t

Answer 1

This is caused by the new flexible Heredoc syntaxes in PHP 7.3.

In previous versions of PHP, the closing marker was not allowed to have indentation:

    $string = <<<EOF
Hello
EOF;

As of PHP 7.3, the closing marker can be indented.

In this example, EOF is indented by 4 spaces. The body of the string will also have 4 spaces stripped from the beginning of each line.

    $string = <<<EOF
    Hello
    EOF;

If the closing marker is indented further than any lines of the body, it will throw a Parse error:

    $string = <<<EOF
  Hello
    EOF;

The reason for the error message is two-fold:

• The closing marker is indented further than 1 or more lines within the body

But perhaps more likely, for those upgrading to PHP 7.3:

• I've chosen a marker HTML which is also present within the string. Because of the flexible spacing now allowed, PHP was incorrectly detecting that the string had closed before I intended.