br tags in equations due to wpautop, is it safe to disable htmlspecialchars?

Hi, while testing the plugin I tried this code

[latex display=true]x = \begin{cases}
   a &\text{if } b \\
   c &\text{if } d
\end{cases}[/latex]

and this is the output

As you can see there are <br> tags, which I think are generated by the wpautop function of wordpress. In fact by writing the equation on a single line such as

[latex display=true]x = \begin{cases} a &\text{if } b \\ c &\text{if } d \end{cases}[/latex]

the output is displayed correctly without br tags.
I would like to keep wpautop activated since it is helpful in most of the cases, so I think it is better to edit the plugin.

In the file frontend.php I noticed the following line

$enc = htmlspecialchars( html_entity_decode( $content ) );

and by removing the function htmlspecialchars

$enc = html_entity_decode( $content );

the problem seems to be solved, in fact the output is correct.
But I am worried that by removing the that function something bad coould happen in some situations.

So is it safe to disable it? Is there a better way to solve the problem?

• This topic was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by giannit.