Declaring and Accessing INI Settings

Summary

In this chapter, you explored the implementation of one of the oldest features in the PHP language, and arguably the greatest obstacle to PHP's otherwise robust portability. With every new INI setting available, the obstacles to writing code that can be run anywhere grow more and more complex. Use these features with discretion and extension will be evermore useful; use them carelessly and its behavior from system to system may become too unpredictable to maintain.

In the next three chapters, you'll delve into the streams API, beginning with use and progressing through the implementation layers into stream and wrapper operations, contexts, and filters.