wptexturize and wpautop problems with html comments and object tags

[Denis-de-Bernardy]

Bumped into this one when upgrading my mediacaster plugin to use swfobject 2.1 (which is not 1.5 compatible), as documented here:

​http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/wiki/documentation

I take it I'm not the only one who is going to need to upgrade a plugin. It's minor, since I'll just move the filter further down in the queue, but it's still worth reporting:

<object id="m544cf9700db147f751dc34ea1241d8bd" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="320" height="260">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/_nkZ3eHeXlc" />
<!--[if !IE]>-->

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/_nkZ3eHeXlc" width="320" height="260">
<!--<![endif]-->
<p><a href="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">Get Flash 9.0</a> to see this player.</p>
<!--[if !IE]>-->
</object>
<!--<![endif]-->
</object>
<script type="text/javascript">
//swfobject.registerObject("m544cf9700db147f751dc34ea1241d8bd", "9.0.0");
</script>

Gets turned into the following mess:

<object id="m544cf9700db147f751dc34ea1241d8bd" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="320" height="260"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/_nkZ3eHeXlc" /><!--[if !IE]>&#8211;><br />
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/_nkZ3eHeXlc" width="320" height="260"><br />
<!--<![endif]--></p>
<p><a href="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">Get Flash 9.0</a> to see this player.</p>
<p><!--[if !IE]>&#8211;><br />
</object><br />

<!--<![endif]--><br />
</object><br />
<script type="text/javascript">
//swfobject.registerObject("m544cf9700db147f751dc34ea1241d8bd", "9.0.0");
</script>

So, two/three issues:

• wpautop should also ignore double object tags, and html comments
• wptexturize should ignore html comments

No patch. Does someone want to take a look at this for WP 3.0?

Bumpy bump! I'd greatly appreciate this being fixed as I'm moving my video plugin over to using this type of embedding.

Not sure if I'm good enough with regex to make a patch myself though.

The wpautop() issue could also affect normal embeds (i.e. oEmbed).

Related: #8912

For wpautop the fix is to ensure that there aren't any line breaks inside the <object> tag. There is a regex in it that tries to remove them (in both the php and JS versions) but it is not HTML comments aware.

The above example breaks because the IE conditionals are on new lines. We could add yet another regex to specifically check for HTML comments but it's generally better for plugins to remove any line breaks from complex <object> blocks when inserting them before wpautop (this is true for all complex HTML blocks too). The objects inserted by WordPress work properly.

The wptexturize part will be fixed to skip HTML tags in #4539.

Replying to norbertm:

The wptexturize part will be fixed to skip HTML tags in #4539.

Including test cases with #4539, specifically for the <!--[if !IE]>--> and <!--<![endif]--> sections.