What are the recommended best practices for handling PHP version discrepancies when working with remote file access in PHP scripts?

When working with remote file access in PHP scripts, it is important to consider PHP version discrepancies that may affect the functionality of your code. To handle this issue, it is recommended to use PHP's built-in functions that are supported across different PHP versions, such as cURL for remote file access. By using cURL, you can ensure that your script will work consistently regardless of the PHP version being used.

// Example code using cURL for remote file access
$url = 'https://www.example.com/file.txt';

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);

if($response === false) {
    echo 'Error: ' . curl_error($ch);
} else {
    echo $response;
}

curl_close($ch);