Making parse_ini_*() aware of types

Hi internals, I was going through the bug list and found this report: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=38409 It discusses the fact that parse_ini_file() and parse_ini_string() throw away type information; for instance, the flag “on” doesn’t translate into a bool(true) but string(“1”). The report has had 21 votes and an average score of 4.3 +- 0.7, so it seems to have some traction with users. Simply changing this behaviour would cause BC, so I’ve found a way in which this can be solved with a separate scanner mode; e.g.: $data = parse_ini_file(‘/path/to/file’, true, INI_SCANNER_TYPED); A patch for the lexer can be found here, together with a simple test case: https://github.com/datibbaw/php-src/compare/php:master...datibbaw:ini-scanner-plus It currently distinguishes between booleans, numbers and NULL (it was mentioned in the ticket by someone else, not entirely sure of its usefulness, though). I haven’t benchmarked it, but the impact on performance should be quite minimal. Thoughts?