If PHP is not working correctly, it is advisable to use php -i and see whether any error messages are printed out before or in place of the information tables.
This option provides a convenient way to only perform a syntax check on the given PHP code. On succes, the text No syntax errors detected in filename is written to standard output and the shell return code is 0. On failure, the text Errors parsing filename in addition to the internal parser error message is written to standard output and the shell return code is set to 255.