How does the placement of the session_start() function affect the occurrence of PHP warnings in a script?

The placement of the session_start() function affects the occurrence of PHP warnings because it must be called before any output is sent to the browser. If session_start() is placed after any HTML content or whitespace, it may result in "headers already sent" warnings. To solve this issue, ensure that session_start() is called at the very beginning of the script before any output is generated.

<?php
session_start();

// Rest of the PHP script
?>