What is a PHP file
PHP is known as a server-side scripting language. It is used in web development as well as a general-purpose programming language. It was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 and is nowadays installed in over 240 million websites. Files with the PHP extension represent web pages that contain code in the aforementioned programming language.
PHP files can contain code that is used to execute different online processes. The PHP engine on a web server parses the PHP code contained in the file and dynamically generates HTML code from it. This is what the user actually sees when visiting a webpage, thus the underlying PHP code and file are not visible for the user.
Here's a small, but not exhaustive list of programs that can open PHP documents:
- Adobe Dreamweaver CC 2015
- Eclipse PHP Development Tools
- Zend Studio
- MPSoftware phpDesigner
- ES-Computing EditPlus
- Blumentals WeBuilder
- Notepad++
- WampServer
- Web browsers
