[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #50683: Parse content for shortcodes instead of using regex

[WordPress Trac]

#50683: Parse content for shortcodes instead of using regex
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 Reporter:  cfinke                               |       Owner:  (none)
     Type:  enhancement                          |      Status:  reviewing
 Priority:  normal                               |   Milestone:  Future
                                                 |  Release
Component:  Shortcodes                           |     Version:
 Severity:  normal                               |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  has-patch has-unit-tests needs-      |     Focuses:
  test-info                                      |
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Comment (by dmsnell):

 In recent months I’ve come to the opinion that we //must// declare
 Shortcode processing as a step ahead of HTML parsing. There is a
 particular construction common in some shortcodes that illustrate this
 point..


 {{{
 <p>This site contains [post-count before="<span class='post-count'>"
 after="</span>"] posts</p>
 }}}

 Now this example raises questions regarding translation, but looking those
 aside, it embeds HTML inside its shortcode arguments. We can only use the
 HTML API to find this if we break spec-compliance to find these. That is
 not something that I believe will help WordPress as it will make it near
 impossible to maintain that spec-compliance through the test suite we’ve
 established. It would be a huge step backwards.

 Pending any actual behavioral changes (i.e. backwards-compatibility
 breaks) this would imply we have to handle Shortcodes before processing
 HTML. I believe that the associated PRs and patches do this, but I wanted
 to leave this note in the open about it. To my knowledge, this is not
 spec’d in WordPress and different existing flows probably handle these
 before //or// after processing HTML.

 For example, if the goal is to extract the first three paragraphs of a
 post…we have to process all shortcodes //before// truncating the document.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/50683#comment:47>
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