[Plugin: emObA – Email Obfuscator Advanced] emObA and WP search

Oops, I caught the Kirkpatrick and didn’t see the Kim – sorry about that Kim!

Hi Elisabeth,

The same thing happens on category archive pages, where post excerpts are listed.

I suspect your search is set up to return only excerpts from the found pages rather than entire pages? If so, what is happening is that wp_trim_excerpt() is being called, and it insists on applying strip_tags() (which removes all html) after content filters are applied. This means that no plugin can insert code (html or javascript) into the page excerpt.

This problem appears throughout the design of WordPress: Plugin authors are as untrusted as blog posters are — safety filters are applied after rather than before the filter lists created by the various plugins.

I don’t know of any fix short of a recognition by the designers of this error and their changing the order of some lines in various core functions. (You could fix it for your own sites by rewriting wp_trim_excerpt. But I can’t do that generally for users of emObA — and it’s a constant pain when WP upgrades.)

Sorry. (And if anyone has ideas for a fix, I’d love to hear from you!)
Kim Kirkpatrick

One approach that requires surgery on your themes, but not on the WP core: Put this function in your theme’s functions.php file, and throughout your theme files, replace wp_trim_excerpt with my_wp_trim_excerpt. The emails will be obfuscated, some will actually be links. It is tricky to know what will look better, what worse, using this. Try it, discard if it’s not nice.

@elisabeth: I don’t know if this will help your problem with search — don’t know if your search page explicitly calls wp_trim_excerpt. But if it doesn’t, modifying your search functions something like this might work for you.

function my_wp_trim_excerpt($text) {
	$raw_excerpt = $text;
	if ( '' == $text ) {
			$text = get_the_content('');
			$text = strip_shortcodes( $text );
			$text = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $text);
			$text = strip_tags($text);
			$excerpt_length = apply_filters('excerpt_length', 55);
			$words = explode(' ', $text, $excerpt_length + 1);
			if (count($words) > $excerpt_length) {
					array_pop($words);
					array_push($words, '[...]');
					$text = implode(' ', $words);
			}
		$text = apply_filters('the_content', $text);
	}
	return apply_filters('my_wp_trim_excerpt', $text, $raw_excerpt);
}

Kim Kirkpatrick

Hi Kim,
Thanks so much for your help on this. My archive.php and search.php theme files use the <?php the_excerpt() ?> function. I tried adding the code above to my functions.php file, to no avail. I’m not a PHP expert by any means; is there something simple I’m missing here? Thank you again!
Elisabeth

I can’t see any way to fix the_excerpt; the destructive filtering is done very deep in the base code, requiring the construction of a very large amount of “my_” code.

Something that might work (it does in my themes): Change all occurrences of the_excerpt('') in your theme’s files to echo my_wp_trim_excerpt('') (along with adding function my_wp_trim_excerpt to functions.php). This works because wp_trim_excerpt usually gives the same text output as the_excerpt does.