title: php include file stopped working
body: <p>Learning PHP and MySQL. Made a short script that retrieves contents from the database, and populates it in a  tag in my html header.</p>
  
  <p><strong>index.php:</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?php
  
  $link = mysqli_connect('localhost', 'root', 'abdullah');
  
  if (!$link) {
      echo "Could not connect";
      exit();
  }
  
  if (!mysqli_select_db($link, 'chitra')){
      echo "Could not find database";
      exit();
  }
  
  $query = 'SELECT * FROM photos;';
  $result = mysqli_query($link, $query);
  
  while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)){  
    $categories[] = $row['category'];
  }
  
  include 'main.html';
  
  ?&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>main.html:</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE html&gt;
  &lt;html&gt;
      &lt;head&gt;
          &lt;title&gt;Chitra&lt;/title&gt;
          &lt;link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="index.css"&gt;
      &lt;/head&gt;
      &lt;body&gt;
  
          &lt;header&gt;
              &lt;div id="header_username"&gt;username&lt;/div&gt;
              &lt;div id="header_cat"&gt;
                  &lt;select&gt;
  
                      &lt;?php foreach ($categories as $category): ?&gt;
                      &lt;option&gt;&lt;?php echo htmlspecialchars($category, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'); ?&gt;&lt;/option&gt;
                      &lt;?php endforeach; ?&gt;
  
                  &lt;/select&gt;
              &lt;/div&gt;
          &lt;/header&gt;
          &lt;main&gt;
            TODO
          &lt;/main&gt;
      &lt;/body&gt;
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This code was initially working. I started working on the  body for a while, until suddenly, it started returning me a <strong>blank white page.</strong> I removed my main content to start over from scratch, but it still give me the same result.</p>
  
  <p>I put echo statemnts throughout the PHP file, everything is executing fine until right before the include statement. I checked my Apache, MySQL, PHP installations, checked that everything is up and running. Everything is. I can't figure out the issue.</p>