PHP Beautifier

Unformatted PHP is a tax on everyone who reads it after you, and most PHP in the wild was formatted by nobody: copied from a forum, generated by a template, or written at 2 a.m. against a deadline. This php beautifier re-formats pasted PHP to clean, consistent PSR-12 style right in your browser – real parsing, real syntax errors reported honestly, with indent width and brace style under your control. The formatter is the Prettier engine with its PHP plugin, loaded onto this page. Your code is never uploaded, which for client work and unreleased projects is the whole point.

How to beautify PHP code

1. Paste your PHP into the top box. A full file starting with the opening tag works, and so does a bare snippet: when the opening tag is missing the tool adds it and tells you it did.
2. Pick the indent: four spaces, the PSR-12 standard, or two spaces if your project runs tighter.
3. Pick the brace style. PSR-12 puts class and function braces on their own line. The 1TBS style keeps them attached to the line above, the way many JavaScript-trained teams prefer.
4. The formatted code appears below as you type. Copy it, or press the button to download it as a .php file.
5. If the code will not parse, you get a plain error instead of a mangled guess. A beautifier that hides a syntax error has done you no favour.

What the formatter actually changes

Whitespace and layout, nothing else. Indentation is rebuilt from the structure of the code, braces move to the chosen style, spacing around operators and after commas is normalised, and long lines are arranged the way the standard prescribes. Your logic, your variable names, your comments and your strings come out untouched, character for character where it counts. That boundary matters: a formatter you cannot trust to leave meaning alone is a refactoring tool wearing the wrong badge, and this one is deliberately only a formatter. It is the same engine, Prettier with the PHP plugin, that development teams run inside their editors, loaded here as a web page.

PSR-12, in one short paragraph

PSR-12 is the PHP-FIG coding style standard most of the PHP world now shares: four-space indents, braces for classes and methods on their own line, one space after commas, visibility declared on every property and method, and a handful of other agreements that make any file feel familiar to any PHP reader. Formatting to a shared standard is not tidiness for its own sake. It removes the layout argument from code review, makes diffs show real changes instead of indentation noise, and means the next reader spends attention on what the code does. The options here exist because standards bend to house style – but they bend between two named styles, not into mush. Companion tools for the same desk work sit under Developer Tools, including the JSON Formatter and the HTML Formatter built on the same engine family.

Why browser-side formatting matters for PHP

Online beautifiers usually work by uploading your code to a stranger’s server, which for a quick public snippet is fine and for a client’s codebase is a policy violation with extra steps. This page loads the formatting engine itself – about a quarter of a megabyte of JavaScript – and after that the code you paste travels nowhere. Close the tab and it is gone. The trade-off is honesty-sized: a full parser in a browser tab handles files of a few thousand lines comfortably, and very large generated files are better formatted locally in your editor with the same engine. For the daily case – a function, a template, a copied example – the browser is the right place.