Application built on joomla displaying raw data on localhost

Question

m having a strange problem never faced it before and tried every thing and i mean everything but no luck at all.

What happened was i downloaded the application source code built on joomla 1.7 via ftp from the live server and deployed it on my localhost and configured it correctly. Now what happened is it displaying some sort of raw data all over the browser window, attached is the screenshot.

Please guys its been 5 days since i stuck in this mess any help will be highly appreciated

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Maybe you have installed an extension, which supports distribution of PHP code as binary code? There exist different extensions to PHP, which support this kind of functionality. Probably the most widespread is Zend Guard. To execute a script which was encrypted by this software your PHP needs to load the free loader extension provided by Zend. If your server has loaded this extension and your localhost does not, the output might be something like you encounter.

Your first step should be to compare the output of phpinfo of both servers. If Zend Guard (or a similar extension) is loaded on your production server and not on your localhost, this might be the problem. Next step should involve taking a look at the PHP files and search for one which contains lots of unreadable characters. If this seems unreasonable to you, you might as well just install Zend Loader and see if it works then, which might be less work.