How can the presence of spaces in file paths impact PHP configuration and functionality?

Having spaces in file paths can cause issues in PHP configuration and functionality because PHP may interpret the space as a delimiter, resulting in errors when trying to access or include files. To avoid this problem, it is recommended to use file paths without spaces or to properly escape the spaces in the paths.

// Example of using properly escaped file path with spaces
$file_path = 'C:/Program Files/example file.txt';
$file_path = str_replace(' ', '\ ', $file_path);

// Now $file_path can be safely used in PHP functions
echo file_get_contents($file_path);