Shortcode without closing tag

[rilwis]

Hi,

I've just found a bug with shortcodes when developing my theme. The problem is if we put 2 instances of a shortcode next to each other, one without closing tag, one with closing tag, then they don't work as expected.

This is sample code:

add_shortcode( 'test', 'rw_test' );

function rw_test( $atts, $content )
{
	$atts = shortcode_atts( array(
		'name' => 'WordPress',
	), $atts );

	return $atts['name'];
}

echo do_shortcode( '[test][test name="Anh"][/test]' );

The expected result is "WordPressAnh", but it displays only "WordPress".

I think the regular expression has a bug here, but it looks too complicated to me so I hope someone can join and fix this bug.

Thanks.

[pento]

Thanks for the bug report!

This is expected behaviour from the shortcode parser. In your particular example, there's no way to tell which [test] shortcode the [/test] closing tag belongs to, so the parser assumes it belongs to the first one it encounters.

If you change your example to this:

echo do_shortcode( '[test][/test][test name="Anh"][/test]' );

It will function as expected.

[rilwis]

I don't think that's expected result.

What I posted is just an example code. What happens if we put [test] somewhere in the first paragraph of post content, and the second one in very bottom of that (which means there're a lot of content between them)? The result can't be predicted. And the most important thing is they're valid shortcodes and should work properly.

If we can't solve this problem, then we have to force user to always close shortcodes, because any shortcode that works without closing tag can cause the similar problem.

[pento]

In this scenario, it's still not possible for us to assume that the behaviour you're describing will always be expected - it's a legitimate use case to want to nest shortcodes, even across multiple paragraphs.

Given that the existing behaviour has existed for a very long time, there's no way to change it without breaking a lot of sites.

[rilwis]

The existing behaviour is fine and I don't mean to change it. What I mean is it doesn't consider every cases and I hope there's a work around that to improve that.

The most important thing is we are told that the shortcode without closing tag is valid if it doesn't need any content. Everyone is told that. But if we have 2 such shortcodes in the post content, then it breaks the post.

That actually is a bug and should be fixed.