With GNU findutils, and a shell with support for process substitution (ksh, zsh, bash), you can do:

xargs -r0a <(locate -0 php.ini) vi

The idea being to pass the file list via a -a filename rather than stdin.

With zsh, you could do:

vi ${(0)"$(locate -0 php.ini)"}

(where 0 is the parameter expansion flag to split on NULs).

However note that contrary to xargs -r that still runs vi without arguments if no file is found.

With GNU findutils, and a shell with support for process substitution (ksh, zsh, bash), you can do:

xargs -r0a <(locate -0 php.ini) vi

The idea being to pass the file list via a -a filename rather than stdin. Using -0 makes sure it works regardless of what characters or non-characters the file names may contain.

With zsh, you could do:

vi ${(0)"$(locate -0 php.ini)"}

(where 0 is the parameter expansion flag to split on NULs).

However note that contrary to xargs -r that still runs vi without argument if no file is found.