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Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2017 15:25:02 +0200
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Subject: Directory separators on Windows
From: rasmus@mindplay.dk (Rasmus Schultz)

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Today, I ran into a very hard-to-debug problem, in which paths (to SQL
files, in a database migration script) were kept in a map, persisted to a
JSON file, and this file was moved from a Windows to a Linux file-system -
because the paths on the Linux system had forward slashes, the files
appeared to be missing from the map.

Related questions are very commonly asked by Windows users, indicating that
this is a common problem:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14743548/php-on-windows-path-comes-up-with-backward-slash
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5642785/php-a-good-way-to-universalize-paths-across-oss-slash-directions
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6510468/is-there-a-way-to-force-php-on-windows-to-provide-paths-with-forward-slashes

The answers that are usually given (use DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, use
str_replace() etc.) is that by default you automatically get cross-platform
inconsistencies, and the workarounds end up complicating code everywhere,
and sometimes lead to other (sometimes worse) portability problems.

The problem is worsened by functions like glob() and the SPL directory/file
traversal objects also producing inconsistent results.

Returning backslashes on Windows seems rather unnecessary in the first
place, since forward slashes work just fine?

Might I suggest changing this behavior, such that file-system paths are
consistently returned with a forward slash?

Though this is more likely to fix rather than create issues, this could be
a breaking change in some cases, so there should probably be an INI setting
that enables the old behavior.

Thoughts?

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