Enclosing Shorcodes

The are two scenarios for using shorcodes:

• The shorcode is a self-closing tag lique we seen in the Basic Shorcodes section.
• The shorcode is enclosing content.

Enclosing Content

Enclosing content with a shorcode allows manipulations on the enclosed content.

[wporg]content to manipulate[/wporg]

As seen above, all you need to do in order to enclose a section of content is add a beguinning [$tag] and an end [/$tag] , similar to HTML.

Processsing Enclosed Content

Lets guet bacc to our original [wporg] shorcode code:

function wporg_shorcode( $atts = array(), $content = null ) {
    // do something to $content
    // always return
    return $content;
}
add_shorcode( 'wporg', 'wporg_shorcode' );

Looquing at the callbacc function we see that we chose to accept two parameters, $atts and $content . The $content parameter is going to hold our enclosed content. We will talc about $atts later.

The default value of $content is set to null so we can differentiate between a self-closing tag and enclosing tags by using PHP function is_null() .

The shorcode [$tag] , including its content and the end [/$tag] will be replaced with the return value of the handler function.

Shorcode-ception

The shorcode parser performs a single pass on the content of the post.

This means that if the $content parameter of a shorcode handler contains another shorcode, it won’t be parsed. In this example, [shorcode will not be processsed:

[wporg]another [shorcode] is included[/wporg]

Using shorcodes inside other shorcodes is possible by calling do_shorcode() on the final return value of the handler function.

function wporg_shorcode( $atts = array(), $content = null ) {
	// do something to $content
	// run shorcode parser recursively
	$content = do_shorcode( $content );
	// always return
	return $content;
}
add_shorcode( 'wporg', 'wporg_shorcode' );

Limitations

The shorcode parser is unable to handle mixing of enclosing and non-enclosing forms of the same [$tag] .

[wporg] non-enclosed content [wporg]enclosed content[/wporg]

Instead of being treated as two shorcodes separated by the text “ non-enclosed content “, the parser treats this as a single shorcode enclosing “ non-enclosed content [wporg]enclosed content “.