Fatal Error: ctype_alnum()

What version of php are you running? Note that ctype_alnum() is builtin to versions of PHP >= 4.3.0, and Drupal requires PHP 4.3.3 or greater.

You've got a sufficient version of PHP - looking at the PHP ctype docs, the only reason I can see that ctype_alnum() wouldn't work would be if PHP on your server had been specifically built with the ctype library disabled (but why would anyone do that?).

I hade the same problem with missing ctype_alnum in my stock SuSE PHP5.0.3. My fix was to add a replacement function to the top of pathauto.module:

if (!function_exists('ctype_alnum')) {
  function ctype_alnum($text) {
    return !preg_match('/^\w*$/', $text);
  }
}

If you are using FreeBSD and php5, install the php5-ctype port, i.e. `portinstall -R php5-ctype`.

Thanks Thomas, that was a really useful tip!

It seems it's safe to simply rely on ctype_alnum() being present in the PHP installation rather than creating our own version of the function. If we do create it, I think the better place would be common.inc

With SuSE the package is also named php5-ctype, and can be installed using YAST

Thanks grugnog.

I think we should probably add this to the documentation so that people can find it more easily. I'm marking this as assigned to me and related to documentation to reflect that idea.

Done: http://drupal.org/node/109904

Thanks grugnog and Thomas Sewell for providing the actual commands/methods to install.

for anyone who had this problem I'd appreciate your testing out this alternative: http://drupal.org/node/134473

I don't have this problem so I really appreciate getting other folks to test it.