No external libraries are needed to build this extension, but if you want PHP to support LFS (large files) on Linux, then you need to have a recent glibc and you need compile PHP with the following compiler flags: -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64.
Installation
There is no installation needed to use these functions; they are part of the PHP core.
Runtime Configuration
The behaviour of these functions is affected by settings in php.ini.
Table 1. Filesystem and Streams Configuration Options
Name
Default
Changeable
allow_url_fopen
"1"
PHP_INI_ALL
user_agent
NULL
PHP_INI_ALL
default_socket_timeout
"60"
PHP_INI_ALL
from
NULL
??
auto_detect_line_endings
"Off"
PHP_INI_ALL
Here's a short explanation of the configuration directives.
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.
Note: This option was introduced immediately after the release of version 4.0.3. For versions up to and including 4.0.3 you can only disable this feature at compile time by using the configuration switch
--disable-url-fopen-wrapper.
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.
Note: This configuration option was introduced in PHP 4.3.0
Resource Types
Predefined Constants
The constants below are defined by this extension, and will only be available when the extension has either been compiled into PHP or dynamically loaded at runtime.
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