Thank you for taking the time to write to us, but this is not
a bug. Please double-check the documentation available at
http://www.php.net/manual/ and the instructions on how to report
a bug at http://bugs.php.net/how-to-report.php

It isn't require() or include() that fails when you try including an syntactically incorrect file.

As the manual says: "Files are included based on the file path given or, if none is given, the include_path specified. The include() construct will emit a warning if it cannot find a file; this is different behavior from require(), which will emit a fatal error."

If you try doing something like fopen(%&/%!, 'r'); you will also get a parse error even though fopen()'s failure error level is E_WARNING. That's not because fopen() is failing but because the PHP file simply isn't valid.

You simply cannot continue past a parse error. It doesn't make sense trying to figure out if you meant something else or if you're really just feeding it junk.