What is an inc and why use it

Question

I often see examples in PHP that include inc files  What is the meaning of  inc  What it is used for  What are the disadvantages and advantages of using it

User · Answer

Generally means that its a file that needs to be included and does not make standalone script in itself.

This is a convention not a programming technique.

Although if your web server is not configured properly it could expose files with extensions like .inc.

User · Answer

Note that You can configure Apache so that all files With  inc extension are forbidden to be retrieved by visiting URL directly   see link https   serverfault com questions 22577 how-to-deny-the-web-access-to-some-files

User · Answer

If you are concerned about the file s content being served rather than its output  You can use a double extension like  file inc php  It then serves the same purpose of helpfulness and maintainability   I normally have 2 php files for each page on my site    One named welcome php in the root folder  containing all of the HTML markup   And another named welcome inc php in the inc folder  containing all PHP functions specific to the welcome php page    EDIT  Another benefit of using the double extention  inc php would be that any IDE can still recognise the file as PHP code

User · Answer

Just to add  Another disadvantage would be   inc files are not recognized by IDE thus  you could not take advantage of auto-complete or code prediction features

User · Answer

In my opinion  these were used as a way to quickly find include files when developing  Really these have been made obsolete with conventions and framework designs

User · Answer

It s just a way for the developer to be able to easily identify files which are meant to be used as includes  It s a popular convention  It does not have any special meaning to PHP  and won t change the behaviour of PHP or the script itself

User · Answer

This is a convention that programmer usually use to identify different file names for include files  So that if the other developers is working on their code  he can easily identify why this file is there and what is purpose of this file by just seeing the name of the file

User · Answer

It has no meaning  it is just a file extension  It is some people s convention to name files with a  inc extension if that file is designed to be included by other PHP files  but it is only convention    It does have a possible disadvantage which is that servers normally are not configured to parse  inc files as php  so if the file sits in your web root and your server is configured in the default way  a user could view your php source code in the  inc file by visiting the URL directly   Its only possible advantage is that it is easy to identify which files are used as includes  Although simply giving them a  php extension and placing them in an includes folder has the same effect without the disadvantage mentioned above

[php] What is an .inc and why use it?

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