I have a WordPress site hosted with BlueHost. When I FTP on to the server, edit a WordPress theme file and re-upload, I get a white screen with the following error
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '}' in /home/challey3/public_html/wp-content/themes/challengers/page-invoice-payment.php on line 1
The code is being downloaded directly to my hard drive and edited using PhpStorm, I've noticed then when I open the file in PhpStorm there is an additional blank line between each line of code, whereas the additional lines are not present when editing through Notepad.
The changes to the code were adding a jQuery snippet to the HTML and no modifications were made to the PHP itself. Undoing adding the snippet and re-uploading have the same effect, however, if I do a Git revert and re-upload the problem is resolved.
The only thing I can think is that the file is being encoded differently through PhpStorm/Windows and uploading it back to the server is somehow breaking things. The server is running Ubuntu.
PhpStorm does not modify the file during transfer (upload or download).. so it must be server-side (FTP) setting.
As per my knowledge it's about line ending used in that file + specific FTP server config.
My assumption (based on personal experience working with 2 such already "broken" sites + info from other users who faced the same) is that during upload FTP server reacts on CR (used as line ending symbol -- CRLF is what Windows uses) and tries to "fix" it by replacing it by LF.
The FTP server may simply be doing it wrong -- instead of replacing whole CRLF it just does it on CR only.. so you may simply ending up with LFLF (2 line endings in Unix style -- 2nd one makes that extra empty line).
If I'm correct -- try converting that file in IDE to use Unix style LF as line separators first (either via Status Bar (next to encoding) or File | Line Separators).
In any case: here is the ticket in PhpStorm's Issue Tracker -- maybe one day they can offer some better solution: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WI-9103 -- watch it (star/vote/comment) to get notified on any progress.