note 63723 deleted from function.stream-context-get-default by bjori

Note Submitter: RQuadling at GMail dot com ---- One way of achieving a system wide default context is to use the php.ini setting auto_prepend_file. By creating a php script which is placed anywhere in the include_dir paths, you can assign the default context for all streams. This is of most use when you are behind a firewall and without the context, stream functions like fopen('http://www.site.com/page.html') fail as the proxy server rejects the request. The auto_prepend_file itself can be anything you like. The sort of things you can include in it are ... 1 - __autoload() Control the automatic loading of classes on demand. This helps reduce the amount of loading and memory usage when a script starts. 2 - Global Uncaught Exception Handling By placing a set_exception_handler() function in this file you can catch ALL exceptions. A much nicer way than having the page be just an error. 3 - Global error handling Pretty much the same as 2 really, but for generic PHP errors. Ideally, these are the things you should engineer out of the code. 4 - Default Stream Context. As I mentioned, if you are behind a firewall, then having a default context is EXTREMELY useful. Thanks to tiago at mdtestudio for alerting me to this function. The great thing about the auto_prepend_file is that is can be set on a per directory basis. This means that if you are on a shared host, you can see the auto_prepend_file setting within your webroot. There is also auto_append_file which probably has more use for traditional HTML footers. I've not found a PHP specific reason for this setting. Yet.