parse_ini_file and “special meaning” characters

Today I ran into a parse error while trying to read in a .ini file I created.

The value of the line in error had a single quote in it…

Odd.

Off to php.net to look up what are the valid characters for a value in a .ini file.

Here’s what I found for parse_ini_file

Characters ?{}|&~![()^” must not be used anywhere in the key and have a special meaning in the value.

Special meaning… Ok, what exactly is the special meaning, I could not find it documented anywhere, but I did find something that helped me in a PHP bug report.

I did not want the “special meaning” to have any special meaning so I placed them inside single quotes. But lo and behold I also had a single quote. I just escaped the single quote (”’) and all was good.

Hope this helps