Getting an error using constants

Question

I have a lot of pages, all of which require the file characters.php. This file contains constants which define many things in my website. They are

Answer 1

Support for const outside of class definitions was not added until PHP 5.3, so your 5.2.x is too old to use this. See http://php.net/const

Answer 2

In PHP 5.2 it's define('constant_name', 'value');

Answer 3

A constant must not have any $ sign at the beginning. Try const HUMAN_HEALTH = 1.1 instead.

As Marc B mentioned, const outside classes is only available up from PHP 5.3.

Answer 4

To add possible causes to those already mentioned: use of the $ character, and old PHP version; I leave this clarification from the manual that was useful to detect the problem in my case:

As opposed to defining constants using define(), constants defined using the const keyword must be declared at the top-level scope because they are defined at compile-time. This means that they cannot be declared inside functions, loops, if statements or try/ catch blocks.