Should I escape wordpress functions like the_title, the_excerpt, the_content

3 comments

1. Escaping depends entirely on the context in which you are using the functions. What is safe for displaying inside <h1> tags, is not necessarily safe to display for the value attribute of an input field, and even that wouldn’t necessarily be safe as a href attribute value….

   In short – perform the sanitisation yourself as you output it. Though in the case of the_title () or get_the_title (), esc_html is not necessary, since WordPress applies the following functions:

   • convert_chars
   • wptexturize

   Note: the_title prints the title – so esc_html ( the_title () ) won’t work. Similarly, the_content prints the content (in any case, you’d expect the content to display HTML).

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2. Yes and no – depends on whether you want html in those functions to be output or not. If you escape the_content(), for example, and it contains a <div> tag, that tag would actually be output to the page as <div> instead.

   By the way, if you do escape the output of those functions, you’ll want to use their “get_” equivalents (ex. get_the_content()) as those functions echo their output directly.

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3. You can simply write a function like this and hook it to the_title filter:

   function my_escape_title( $title ){
       return esc_html( $title );
   }
   add_filter( 'the_title', 'my_escape_title' );
   

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