What is the purpose of the shownode function in the PHP code provided?

The shownode function in the provided PHP code is used to display the data stored in a node of a linked list. It takes a node as input and prints out the data value stored in that node. To implement the fix, we can modify the shownode function to check if the input node is null before trying to access its data value. This will prevent any errors that may occur when trying to display data from a null node.

function shownode($node) {
    if($node != null) {
        echo $node->data . " ";
    } else {
        echo "Node is null";
    }
}