@leo's

Ok, Mirko made me again losing a hell lot of time. He wrote a about his implementation of a quine in Ruby. Quines are just programmes that can replicated themselves without opening a file (also not itself, 'cause that would be too easy in PHP). As usual I had to try this in PHP myself. I found the article from Patrick Schneider very helpfully. He explains a quite cool approach with a base64-encoded-dna pretty clear. I just wrote the solution a bit shorter which brought it down to 159 chars (you have to have it all on one line):

<?=($dna='PD89KCRkbmE9JyonKT9zdHJfcmVwbGFjZShjaHIoNDIpLCAkZG5hLCBiYXNlNjRfZGVjb2RlKCRkbmEpKTonJz8+Cg==n')?
str_replace(chr(42), $dna, base64_decode($dna)):''?>

Unfortunately Mirko did not allow my copy-past solution (damn academics!). And for myself the solution with a generator is not too natural, as using another program to generate a quine is probably not like it was supposed to be. So with help of diff I tried to find my own solution:

php quine | diff -u quine -

I still nearly got a knot in the brain (much nicer in swiss german: "chnopf im chopf"). But after some trying I did had a solution which is with 113 characters even shorter:

<?=($a=array (
  0 => '<?=($a=',
  1 => ')?$a[0].var_export($a,1).$a[1]:"";',
))?$a[0].var_export($a,1).$a[1]:"";

By the way, as a nice start for the language of your choice you should look in the messy c2-wiki (although not all solution there might be work).