debugging a php.ini syntax error

Short answer:

Don't trust the line numbers, look for a syntax error in the lines before the line mentioned in the error.

Long answer:

I had this error too, turned out I was missing a quotation mark around the timezone.

My orignal error was:

PHP:  syntax error, unexpected BOOL_FALSE in /etc/php5/cli/php.ini on line 929

On line 876 I had:

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
date.timezone = Europe/Madrid"

After that were lots of commented out lines, the next uncommented line was on 938. The original error said that there was an error on line 929, which made things nicely cryptic. I presume that the difference in line numbers has something to do with the way the php.ini file is parsed, but the point is that the line numbers can't be trusted.

After I corrected the missing quotation mark on line 876 the error dissappeared.

This function solve the problem and fix some erros generate by PHP parse_ini_file. By the away, xtalk_parse_ini_file works like parse_ini_file

function xtalk_parse_ini_file( $filename ){

    $arr = array();

    $file = fopen( $filename, "r" );

    $section = "";
    $ident = "";
    $value = "";

    while ( !feof( $file ) ){           
        $linha = trim(fgets( $file )); 

        if (!$linha){
            continue;
        }   

        // replace comments
        if (substr($linha, 0, 1) == ";"){
            continue;
        }   

        if (substr($linha, 0, 1) == "["){
            $section = substr($linha, 1, strlen($linha)-2);
            continue;
        }

        $pos = strpos($linha, "=");
        if ($pos){
            $ident = trim(substr($linha, 0, $pos - 1));
            $value = trim(substr($linha, $pos + 1, strlen($linha) - $pos + 1 ));

            $pos = strpos($value, ";");
            if ( $pos ){
                $value = trim(substr($value, 0, $pos - 1 )); // replace comments    
            }

        }

        $arr[$section][$ident] = $value;

    }

    fclose($file);

    return $arr;

}