the_title vs the_title_attribute

Maybe somebody who knows better can confirm this, but if I remember right, the_title_attribute produces a “cleaner” version of the_title that can be placed into something like this:

<a href="" title="<?php the_title_attribute() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>

I’m hoping you see the distinction in how I used them–one of them is used within the <a> tag (as an attribute), and one is used as text.

the_title_attribute() accepts its parameters in query-string style format. So instead of:

<?php the_title('<h3>', '</h3>'); ?>

you would do:

<?php the_title_attribute('before=<h3>&after=</h3>'); ?>

Otherwise, they’re exactly the same. (Seems the_title_attribute() is missing in Codex. Will have to fix that…)

EDIT: Dug a bit and see adamrbrown is correct as well.

the_title_attribute() does clean things up, escaping (or rather, converting) certain characters to character entity equivalents, and stripping out any HTML tags.

I had some validation errors, and using the_title_attribute within anchors cleared these up. Shame, however, it doesn’t remove spaces. For example, this:

<a href="mailto:?subject=<?php the_title_attribute(); ?>&amp;body=See:%20<?php the_permalink(); ?>Send</a>

Might produce the following (improperly encoded due to spaces in title – as there nearly always are) URL:

<a href="mailto:?subject=Oh no I have gaps&amp;body=See:%20https://...">Send</a>

We need a parameter to make it produce valid anchors e.g.:

<a href="mailto:?subject=Oh%20no%20I%20have%20gaps&amp;body=See:%20https://...">Send</a>

Both functions are defined in wp-includes/template-functions-post.php. Take a look at them and create a custom function based on them. Put it in your theme’s functions.php. Maybe something like this:

if (!function_exists('the_title_mailto')){
	function the_title_mailto(){
		if ( strlen($title) > 0 ){
			$title = apply_filters('the_title', $title);
			$title = urlencode($title); // fix spaces
		}
		echo $title;
	}
}

Thanks Adam; I put a custom function into the loop and tried out various adaptations of your code above in my theme’s functions.php file, but just couldn’t get it to work (I’m a PHP novice).

Adapting this fix I tried the following:

<?php _e(urlencode(the_title_attribute('echo=0'))); ?>

It works (that is it satisfies “Check syntax” in BBEdit and Tidy; it’s worth noting that the malformed URI fools the W3C validator – which is probably why nobody much cares!).

However, this encodes the spaces with “+”. For example the title of this post, when I click “Send” (Actions box), becomes:

From+Proto.aculo.us+to+jQuery

I’d rather see:

From Proto.aculo.us to jQuery

Any further suggestions?

BTW the functions are defined in wp-includes/post-template.php in WP 2.3.2