problem installing daily counter

Hello as a newbie in building website I have a problem inserting the php script on my website.
I uploaded verything to the server and when I browse to blah/counter/demo.php it works fine. I copied everything in to a html file but when I browse to it (blah/counter/index.html) I see an error in the top of the page.:
show_counter(); /* Returns an associative array */ ?>

(part of the 8 line of the script)

I can't find any differences between the demo and the stuff I copied....Any solutions?

Another Q I have.
Does anything need to be done with the db settings in the config.inc.php, do I need to create an mysql table?

I don't have the script myself...don't need it. but if you are actually seeing that on your page, it means that it is showing up as html.

what type of file is that nested in? is it a .html, .shtml, or .php

also, I don't see the opening php tag of <?

It would be very helpful if you posted a URL, so I can see what is actually going on....kind of hard when the URL is blah blah

I removed it from the main site because of that error. But here is the link to the page
http://www.fairy-nails.nl/counter/top2.htm

I copied everything from the demo.php file into that top2.htm file.
Wrong Idea?

Nobody?

as has been pointed out looks like your missing <? at the very beginning of your code, also you need to rename your htm or html page, to .php