How can the presence of leading whitespace in file names impact the functionality of PHP scripts when reading data from a text file?

Leading whitespace in file names can cause issues when reading data from a text file in PHP because the whitespace can be interpreted as part of the file name, resulting in file not found errors. To solve this issue, you can use the trim() function to remove any leading or trailing whitespace from the file name before trying to open the file.

$filename = trim("  example.txt  ");
$file = fopen($filename, "r");
if ($file) {
    // File reading logic here
    fclose($file);
} else {
    echo "Error opening file.";
}