How to protect your script?

[.Joe.]

Okay, I've seen in alot of scripts that they protect their scripts by using symbols or something. How exactly do they do that? Because I've coded something, but I don't want to release the script because I don't want any leeching, reselling, editing, etc. So does anyone know how exactly to do that?

[Robert]

They encode it. I sometimes use http://www.ioncube.com/ to encode certain php scripts, such as a php script that contains MySQL information for a database. By encoding it, it prevents anyone on the server to be able to read the file (if they managed to) and see the MySQL data information like username/password.