Free PHP Beautifier - Online PSR-12 Code Formatter

Quickly format your PHP code online for free – fast, easy, and PSR-compliant beautification in seconds.

Input PHP Code

Format Classes Format Functions Format Arrays

Indent Size:

Formatted PHP Code

PHP is the undisputed workhorse of the web, powering an incredible percentage of websites, from personal blogs on WordPress to massive enterprise applications built with frameworks like Laravel and Symfony. Given its long history and widespread use, maintaining a consistent and readable coding style is essential for the health and longevity of any project. Our PHP Beautifier is a powerful online tool designed to help developers achieve this effortlessly, automatically formatting code to meet modern standards like PSR-12.

What is a PHP Beautifier?

A PHP Beautifier, also known as a PHP formatter or pretty-printer, is a tool that programmatically restructures PHP source code (.php files) to adhere to a specific, standardized style guide. In the PHP world, the most widely accepted standard is the PSR-12 (Extended Coding Style Guide), which provides a set of rules for writing interoperable and consistent PHP code.

The tool parses your PHP code, understanding its classes, functions, control structures, and even the way it mixes with HTML. It then rewrites the code with standardized indentation, brace placement, spacing, and keyword casing, among other rules. A PHP Beautifier does not change the logic or output of your code; its sole purpose is to make it clean, professional, and easy for human developers to read and maintain.

Why It’s Useful in Digital Workflows

In a professional PHP development workflow, an automated formatter is a non-negotiable tool for efficiency and quality.

Automating PSR-12 Compliance: The PHP Standards Recommendations (PSRs) were created by the PHP Framework Interop Group (PHP-FIG) to establish a common ground for code. Manually following every rule in the PSR-12 specification is tedious and time-consuming. A PHP Beautifier automates this compliance, allowing developers to write code naturally and clean it up with a single click.
Improving Code Readability and Maintainability: Clean code is maintainable code. By enforcing consistent spacing, indentation, and structure, a formatter makes it significantly easier to read and understand complex logic, especially in large files or legacy projects. This clarity is crucial for long-term project success.
Streamlining Team Collaboration: A formatter acts as an impartial referee for code style. It eliminates debates and arguments during code reviews over trivial formatting issues, allowing teams to focus on what really matters: the architecture, performance, and security of the application.

Real-Life Scenarios and Technical Use Cases

The need for a PHP Beautifier is present in the daily work of virtually every PHP developer.

WordPress Development: Developers creating or customizing WordPress themes and plugins use a formatter to ensure their code is clean and adheres to WordPress coding standards, which are largely based on PSR principles.
Modern Framework Development: Developers using frameworks like Laravel or Symfony rely on a formatter to keep their controllers, models, services, and other classes consistent with the framework’s own conventions and the broader PSR standard.
Maintaining Legacy Applications: A massive amount of PHP code in production today was written before modern standards were widely adopted. A PHP Beautifier is often the very first tool used when beginning a project to refactor or modernize a legacy PHP application, making the old code readable and manageable.
Open Source Contributions: When contributing to an open-source PHP project, adhering to its coding style is a must. A formatter makes it easy for contributors to ensure their pull requests meet the required standards.

Why Use Our PHP Beautifier?

Our online PHP Beautifier is engineered to provide the power of a professional formatting engine through a simple, secure, and instantly accessible web interface.

Improves Your Workflow and Saves Countless Hours

Manually formatting PHP code, especially files with mixed HTML and PHP, is a significant time sink. Our tool automates this process entirely, freeing you from the tedious task of aligning code and enforcing style rules. This allows you to stay in a state of flow and focus on building great applications. This efficiency gain is why developers also love tools like our SQL Formatter for database work and our JavaScript Beautifier for frontend logic.

Works Online with Zero Installation

Forget about using Composer to install command-line tools, configuring phpcs.xml files, or setting up editor plugins. Our PHP Beautifier is a 100% web-based utility that works right out of the box. It’s the perfect zero-configuration solution for quick edits, working on a different computer, or simply when you need to format a file without any hassle.

Optimized for Speed and Unmatched Convenience

A good developer tool should be fast and intuitive. Our formatter is built on a high-performance engine that can process and beautify large PHP files in milliseconds. The user interface is clean, simple, and designed for efficiency: paste your code, click one button, and copy your perfectly formatted output.

Enhances Code Quality and Professionalism

Using an automated formatter instantly elevates the quality and professionalism of your codebase. It ensures your code adheres to the same standards used by top companies and open-source projects around the world. This not only makes your code easier to maintain but also reflects a commitment to quality and best practices.

Boosts Productivity for All PHP Developers

From freelancers working on small websites to enterprise teams building massive applications, developer productivity is key. By automating a time-consuming and error-prone task, our PHP Beautifier provides a direct and immediate boost to your productivity, allowing you to ship better code, faster.

How to Use the PHP Beautifier Tool

Our tool is designed to be incredibly straightforward. You can get perfectly formatted, PSR-compliant PHP code in three simple steps.

Step 1 – Upload or Paste Your PHP Code

First, provide your PHP code. You can copy your code from your .php file in your editor or IDE and paste it directly into the input area. The tool is capable of handling all kinds of PHP files, including pure PHP classes, scripts, and files with mixed HTML and PHP.

Step 2 – Click the “Beautify” Button

Once your code is in the input box, simply click the prominent “Beautify” button. Our powerful, in-browser engine will immediately parse your PHP and rewrite it according to the PSR-12 coding style guide.

Step 3 – Copy or Download the Formatted Output

Your professionally structured PHP code will instantly appear in the output panel. You can use the “Copy” button to grab the entire formatted text for pasting back into your project, or use the “Download” button to save the beautified code as a new .php file.

Features of Our PHP Beautifier Tool

Our formatter is built with the professional PHP developer in mind, focusing on accuracy, security, and ease of use.

100% Free and Web-Based: This robust tool is completely free to use, without any rate limits or subscriptions. As a web-based utility, it’s universally accessible from any modern browser.
No Registration or Login Needed: We value your time. There are no mandatory sign-ups. You can use the PHP Beautifier the moment you land on the page, no questions asked.
Instant and Accurate Results: Leveraging a parser that understands the nuances of PHP syntax and the PSR-12 standard, our tool provides formatting that is both immediate and highly accurate.
Works on All Your Devices: Our website is fully responsive, ensuring a seamless experience whether you are on a desktop, tablet, or mobile phone.
Privacy-Focused – Your Code is Safe: We take your privacy and security extremely seriously. All formatting is performed client-side, right in your browser. Your source code is never sent to our servers, ensuring your proprietary application logic and sensitive information remain completely confidential.

Who Can Benefit from Using a PHP Beautifier?

Given PHP’s dominance on the web, this tool is an essential utility for a vast and diverse group of professionals.

Web Developers (WordPress, Laravel, etc.): This is the core audience. Developers working with any PHP-based system use a formatter to maintain high code quality and consistency.
Backend Engineers: Professionals building APIs and server-side logic in PHP rely on a formatter to keep their code clean, maintainable, and easy to debug.
Full-Stack Developers: Developers who work on both the PHP backend and the frontend benefit from formatters for every part of their stack, from this PHP Beautifier to our CSS Beautifier.
Legacy Code Maintainers: A huge number of developers are tasked with maintaining older PHP applications. A formatter is their most valuable first step in making sense of and modernizing legacy code.
Students & Educators: A PHP Beautifier is a fantastic learning tool. It helps students write code that adheres to professional standards from the beginning and allows educators to provide clear and consistent examples.
Freelancers and Agency Developers: Developers who frequently switch between different client projects use a formatter to quickly adapt to and maintain the coding style of each unique codebase.

Unformatted vs. Formatted PHP Code – A Comparison

The difference between inconsistent PHP and PSR-12 compliant PHP is stark, affecting readability, maintainability, and team velocity.

Feature	Unformatted / Non-Compliant PHP	Formatted / PSR-12 Compliant PHP
Readability	Poor. Inconsistent indentation, haphazard placement of curly braces, and lack of spacing around control structure keywords (`if`, `foreach`, etc.) make the code difficult to read and mentally parse. This increases cognitive load.	Excellent. Code follows strict rules for indentation (4 spaces), brace placement (e.g., opening braces on the next line for methods), and spacing, making the code’s structure clear and easy to follow.
Maintainability	Difficult. Returning to a messy file to fix a bug or add a feature is a chore. It’s hard to reason about the code’s flow, which increases the risk of introducing new bugs during modification. The code becomes brittle.	Easy. A clean and predictable layout makes the code a pleasure to work with. Developers can confidently refactor classes or add new functionality because the structure is so clear and standardized.
Debugging Speed	Slow. Finding a missing brace or semicolon can be a frustrating hunt in a wall of unformatted text. Logical errors are also harder to trace when the control flow is not visually apparent.	Fast. The clean structure makes syntax errors stand out. A mismatched brace often becomes immediately obvious because it breaks the indentation pattern. This allows for much quicker debugging of scripts.
Adherence to Standards	None. The code is a mix of different personal styles, making it look unprofessional and making it incompatible with tools that expect PSR-compliant code.	High. A PHP Beautifier automatically enforces the PSR-12 standard, which is the benchmark for professional PHP development. This ensures interoperability and signals a high level of quality.
Code Review Efficiency	Low. Code reviews get sidetracked by endless comments about style and formatting. This is an inefficient use of a senior developer’s time and can be frustrating for the author.	High. All stylistic debates are eliminated. Code reviews become high-value, focused conversations about the important things—architecture, security, and performance—leading to better software.

Tools You May Find Useful

A PHP developer’s work is rarely limited to just PHP. You’re constantly working with databases, APIs, frontend code, and various data formats. Our suite of online tools is designed to support your entire workflow.

After using our PHP Beautifier to clean up your application’s backend logic, you’ll need to work on the frontend it serves. Our HTML Beautifier, CSS Beautifier, and JavaScript Beautifier can keep your client-side code just as clean and professional.

Your PHP application will undoubtedly interact with a database and external APIs. You can use our SQL Formatter to clean up raw SQL queries for debugging. For handling API responses, our JSON Beautifier is an essential tool. If you’re working with older systems, you may also need our XML to JSON Converter. For handling file uploads or data encoding, our Base64 Encode utility is invaluable.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Here are answers to some of the most common questions about formatting PHP code.

What are PSRs and why is PSR-12 important?

PSRs (PHP Standards Recommendations) are a set of coding standards published by the PHP-FIG (Framework Interop Group). PSR-12 is the “Extended Coding Style Guide,” which provides a comprehensive set of rules for formatting PHP code. It is important because it has become the de facto standard in the modern PHP community, ensuring that code is consistent and interoperable between different projects, frameworks, and developers.

How is a PHP Beautifier different from a linter like PHP_CodeSniffer?

A PHP Beautifier (or formatter) automatically rewrites your code to match a specific style. Its only job is to change the formatting. A linter, like PHP_CodeSniffer (PHPCS), analyzes your code and reports violations against a set of rules (which can include PSR-12). Some tools can do both, but their primary functions are different: a formatter changes the code, while a linter checks the code.

Will this tool fix syntax errors or security vulnerabilities in my code?

No. A formatter’s job is to beautify syntactically valid PHP code. If your code has a syntax error (like a missing semicolon), the formatter will fail. It does not analyze your code for security issues like SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS). You must use static analysis tools and follow secure coding practices to handle security.

Does this tool handle files with mixed PHP and HTML?

Yes. A key feature of a good PHP Beautifier is its ability to handle files that contain both PHP blocks (<?php ... ?>) and standard HTML markup. It will correctly format the PHP code inside the blocks while preserving the HTML structure around it.

Is it safe to format my application’s source code with this online tool?

Yes, absolutely. We have designed this tool with privacy as our number one priority. The entire formatting process runs client-side, meaning the code you paste is processed directly in your browser. It is never sent to our servers, ensuring your proprietary business logic remains completely private and secure.