Runtime Configuration

The behaviour of these functions is affected by settings in php.ini.

Filesystem and Streams Configuration Options
Name Default Changeable Changelog
allow_url_fopen "1" INI_SYSTEM  
allow_url_include "0" INI_SYSTEM Deprecated as of PHP 7.4.0.
user_agent NULL INI_ALL  
default_socket_timeout "60" INI_ALL  
from "" INI_ALL  
auto_detect_line_endings "0" INI_ALL Deprecated as of PHP 8.1.0.
sys_temp_dir "" INI_SYSTEM  

Here's a short explanation of the configuration directives.

allow_url_fopen bool

This option enables the URL-aware fopen wrappers that enable accessing URL object like files. Default wrappers are provided for the access of remote files using the ftp or http protocol, some extensions like zlib may register additional wrappers.

allow_url_include bool

This option allows the use of URL-aware fopen wrappers with the following functions: include, include_once, require, require_once.

Note:

This setting requires allow_url_fopen to be on.

user_agent string

Define the user agent for PHP to send.

default_socket_timeout int

Default timeout (in seconds) for socket based streams. Specifying a negative value means an infinite timeout.

from string

The email address to be used on unauthenticated FTP connections and as the value of From header for HTTP connections, when using the ftp and http wrappers, respectively.

auto_detect_line_endings bool

When turned on, PHP will examine the data read by fgets() and file() to see if it is using Unix, MS-Dos or Macintosh line-ending conventions.

This enables PHP to interoperate with Macintosh systems, but defaults to Off, as there is a very small performance penalty when detecting the EOL conventions for the first line, and also because people using carriage-returns as item separators under Unix systems would experience non-backwards-compatible behaviour.

sys_temp_dir string

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User Contributed Notes 3 notes

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129
Pistachio
12 years ago
I'm surprised this isn't mentioned in docs here, but to set these values at runtime use "ini_set()". For example:

<?php
ini_set
("auto_detect_line_endings", true);

// Now I can invoke fgets() on files that contain silly \r line endings.
?>
up
-14
traian dot bratucu at gmail dot com
7 years ago
Please note that although you may try to set default_socket_timeout to something over 20s, you may get tricked by the Linux kernel.

The default value of tcp_syn_retries is set to 5, which will effectively timeout any TCP connection after roughly 20s, no matter what limits you set in PHP higher than this.

The value can be altered by root only, like this:

echo 6 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_syn_retries

A value of 6, as above, will give you a timeout up to ~45s.
up
-22
Chris
7 years ago
If you want to use auto_detect_line_endings, e.g. to recognize carriage return on a Classic Mac file, you must set it before calling fopen. You can then reset it to its original value. E.g,

$original = ini_get("auto_detect_line_endings");
ini_set("auto_detect_line_endings", true);
$handle = fopen($someFile, "r");
ini_set("auto_detect_line_endings", $original);
while (($line = fgets($handle)) !== false) {
  echo "$line\n"; // etc
}

(Reference: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=63341&edit=2)

Keep in mind also that Mac OS X bash does not handle carriage returns well, so if it seems like your code is not working when testing from the command line, redirect your output to a file and then try looking at that. On my system, doing it directly on the command line only showed the last line (with or without this setting turned on).

Also note that this will not do what you want if you have a file with mixed line endings (!). If you really care about that case, you have to do something else, like run the file through a translation first and then read it.
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