PHP Manual
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Instruction separation

As in C or Perl, PHP requires instructions to be terminated with a semicolon at the end of each statement. The closing tag of a block of PHP code automatically implies a semicolon; you do not need to have a semicolon terminating the last line of a PHP block. The closing tag for the block will include the immediately trailing newline if one is present.


<?php
    echo 'This is a test';
?>

<?php echo 'This is a test' ?>

Note: The closing tag of a PHP block at the end of a file is optional, and in some cases not using it is helpful when using output buffering and include() or require().