Why does asterisk appear at the END of a statement???

[tarek01]

This was taken from a working model. Inside the heredoc (<<<) an asterisk appears at the end of each MySQL statement after the semicolon (lines 4 and 10). The actual script contains several statements and it appears after each one, so it's unlikely it was unintentional. Does anyone know its function or purpose?

<?php

$sql_file=<<<SQL_FILE
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `table_name`;*
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `table_name` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `name` varchar(250) default NULL,
  `address` varchar(250) default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
);*
SQL_FILE;

?>

[tarek01]

I finally figured out what the purpose of the * symbol was for when I stumbled upon this in the script:

$sql_statements = split('\;\*', $sql_file);
for ($i = 0; $i < count($sql_statements) - 1; $i++) {
	if (!mysql_query($sql_statements[$i], $connection)) {
		$msg="Failed to submit the query: ".$sql_statements[$i];
		return false;
	}
}

The coder used the split function to break up $sql_file into an array of individual SQL statements wherever a ;* appears. A for loop is then used to execute each statement individually and, in the event of an error, returns which key of the array caused it.

Sorry if I confused anyone!

PLEASE NOTE: The split function is deprecated!