Syntax error on closing brace after opening a php tag

i'm getting trouble with a function that looks pretty much like this:

<?php 
function my_function() {

    if(!empty($variable)) {
        //Do some stuff
    }
    else {
        ?>show a message<?php 
    }
}
?>

The problem is i'm getting a parse error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘}’ in /www/bla/bla/bla.php on line 8

I know for a fact that i'm not missing or have an extra '}' brace because the code works just fine on my local server and i've run a validator to make sure the syntax is correct, however, when i port the code to the online server, i get the error.

I believe it has something to do with the php installation not supporting the closing and reopening of php tags between the condition but i'm not sure how would i go about fixing it.

I know i could just do echo 'message'; instead, but this is not the only place where the script uses that kind of syntax to display messages, so fixing it here would just mean i'd get the 开发者_JS百科error on another line, and then another.

Thanks.

---

As it stands that piece of code runs just fine as is on PHP 5.2.14.

When you pasted in the code are you sure you pasted this line exactly as-is?:

?>show a message<?php

The only thing I can think of is that the code on the server is using a short open tag <? but SHORT_OPEN_TAG is turned off in the server's php.ini, for example :

?>show a message<?

---

I had a similiar issue with my file. This was throwing an error in my file:

<?php } ?> 

This may seem silly, I added a comment which seemed to fix the error:

<?php 
  //
  }
?>