PHP Unexpected character in input: ‘’’ (ASCII=39)

Question

A friend of mine is getting this error on ALL of her websites. They are all on the same server, externally hosted.(the hosting company says they cant help with scripting problems)

Each site even gives the exact some line number, but they all use different Index.php files. I am a bit stumped here, has anyone seen anything like this before?

Warning: Unexpected character in input: ''' (ASCII=39) state=1 in /home/xxxx/public_html/index.php on line 17

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '.' in /home/xxxx/public_html/index.php on line 17

Here is one of the index.php files contents, line 1 - 25 or so

<?php get_header(); ?>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" >

<div class="left-navi-blog">

    <?php include "left-sidebar.php";?>

</div>

<div class="center-blog">
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>


     <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<div class="post-title">
<strong><a id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title=" <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></strong> - 

                      <ahh class="post-title-meta"><?php the_time('F j, Y') ?> by 

                             <?php the_author() ?></ahh>
</div>

Answer 1

A useful addition to help determine this problem for "your friend" would be to post the code on index.php on line 17, plus 2-3 lines above and below.

Answer 2

actually your site is hacked. it happened to me too. all php files are affected. make sure you have very storong secured password. check out your ftp logs. there may be huge downloads and uploads. they insert some iframe .. in many php files.