Processing Shortcode

So home come your plugin doesn’t process shortcode? I did a bunch of searching around and was amazed that you don’t do it.

It does support shortcodes, but only in link and image URLs. For example, this would work:
<a href="[myshortcode]">link text</a>

It doesn’t support shortcodes in other places because it would break a bunch of things: link editing, the ability to remove links without manually updating each post, the ability to add a strike-through effect to broken links, and so on.

To illustrate, lets say your suggested patch is implemented. How would you handle the following situations:

• What happens when you try to edit one of those shortcode links via BLC? There is no actual link to edit, so simply replacing the URL won’t work. Should the plugin somehow convert the new link back to a shortcode? (If so, how?)
• How about removing links? The plugin can’t just remove the shortcode because it doesn’t have the shortcode – it just has the shortcode output.
• Shortcodes can output arbitrary content. How about shortcodes that display a dozen different links? What should the plugin do when the user tries to edit/unlink one of those links?

I think you should detect when a link is found within shortcode and then display those links differently on the broken link lists. Alert the user they were found in shortcode and can’t be fixed automatically. Ideally, at least direct the user to the post/page they were found in (right-most column that you already have).

The name of the plugin is “Broken Link Checker” and I don’t think you should sacrifice the ability to find broken links simply because you can’t do magic on all of them.

I think you should detect when a link is found within shortcode and then display those links differently on the broken link lists.

Sure, that would be nice to have. How would that actually work, though?

How bout this…

*ignore my first post and undo that change.

*Add a new column to your database: tiny_int (1 or 0) titled ‘found_in_shortcode’ or something.

containers.php–

synch function:

Line 274: $all_instances_found = array();

Line 282: if (!empty($found_instances)) { $all_instances_found = array_merge($all_instances_found, $found_instances); }

Line 291:

if ($field == 'post_content' || (empty($field) && $this->default_field == 'post_content')) {
	$shortcode_expanded = do_shortcode($value);
	//Parse the field with each parser
	foreach($parsers as $parser){
		$found_instances_with_shortcode = $parser->parse( $shortcode_expanded, $base_url, $default_link_text );

		//note sure if array_unique or something better could be used here
		foreach($found_instances_with_shortcode as $key => $shortcode_instance) {
			foreach($all_instances_found as $instance){
				if ($shortcode_instance->raw_url == $instance->raw_url && $shortcode_instance->link_text == $instance->link_text) {
					unset($found_instances_with_shortcode[$key]); break;
				}
			}
		}

		foreach($found_instances_with_shortcode as $shortcode_instance){
			$shortcode_instance->found_in_shortcode = 1;
			$shortcode_instance->set_container($this, $name);
			$shortcode_instance->save();
		}
	}
}

instances.php–

Line 27: var $found_in_shortcode = 0;
Lines 236 and 275: update queries to write ‘found_in_shortcode’ value

Then on the admin form, pull and check that value. If “found_in_shortcode” == 1 then display a text “Embdedded in shortcode” and disable the links that are used to fix it.

If I understand correctly, the overall algorithm is this:

1. Find all links in a post. Store them for later use.
2. Run shortcodes.
3. Find all links again.
4. Throw away any links that were already found in step #1.
5. The links that are left were generated by shortcodes.

That looks like it would work. It would more than double the time it takes to parse a post, but that’s acceptable if it’s implemented as an opt-in feature. There are also ways to optimize it, like only doing the extra steps for posts that actually contain shortcodes, and using a map/hashtable to speed up the “did we see this instance already?” checks.

Thank you for actually providing a workable solution. I’ll add this to my to-do list for a future release.

great