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Is there a clean way to get a shortcode's attribute value outside of Wordpress's default behaviour? I am working on a single script outside a Wordpress installation, where I only do include('../wp-load.php'); at the beginning.

In my case, I am looking to get the "caption" attribute from the [caption] shortcode and have found the best way to be is as follows, but I'm very unhappy with this.

Original post's content:

[caption id="attachment_1" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="I'm a wicked cool banana"]<img src="http://banana.dev/uploads/2013/07/banana.jpg" alt="Banana" title="Banana" width="150" height="150" class="size-full wp-image-1" />[/caption]

My script to get the caption from the shortcode:

// prepare full content
$content = $content_post->post_content;
$content = apply_filters('the_content', $content);
$content = str_replace(']]>', ']]&gt;', $content);

// test the HTML and get the part inside
if (preg_match("/<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">(.*)<\\/p>/", $content, $matches)) {
  $caption = $matches[1];
}

But this can't be the best way, can it?

Please note that I'm not looking to get the image's attributes, but the shortcode's attributes.

EDIT 1

As s_ha_dum suggested, I tried getting the shortcode with get_shortcode_regex(), but then I get the following:

array (size=7)
  0 => 
    array (size=1)
      0 => string '[caption id="attachment_1" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="I'm a wicked cool banana"]<img src="http://banana.dev/uploads/2013/07/banana.jpg" alt="Banana" title="Banana" width="150" height="150" class="size-full wp-image-1" />[/caption]' (length=394)
  1 => 
    array (size=1)
      0 => string '' (length=0)
  2 => 
    array (size=1)
      0 => string 'caption' (length=7)
  3 => 
    array (size=1)
      0 => string ' id="attachment_1" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="I'm a wicked cool banana"' (length=206)
  4 => 
    array (size=1)
      0 => string '' (length=0)
  5 => 
    array (size=1)
      0 => string '<img src="http://banana.dev/uploads/2013/07/banana.jpg" alt="Banana" title="Banana" width="150" height="150" class="size-full wp-image-1" />' (length=169)
  6 => 
    array (size=1)
      0 => string '' (length=0)

Which means I still have to Regex $matches[3] to get my desired result.

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1 Answer 1

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2

Don't try to parse the shortcodes and then regex the HTML. Use get_shortcode_regex() to parse the raw post content:

$content = $content_post->post_content;
preg_match_all("/$pattern/",$content,$matches);

Then crawl $matches to find your shortcode data. Use shortcode_parse_atts($matches[3][0]) (note $matches[3][0] to give the first element within the matched shortcode's attributes) to pull apart the attribute string.

Reference:
https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/73461/21376

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  • But I'd still have to use regex to find the caption="I'm a wicked cool banana" bit. Is that correct? Commented Jun 1, 2015 at 15:57
  • No, not if the caption is a shortcode attribute. Did you try the code at all> Commented Jun 1, 2015 at 16:50
  • As a matter of fact I did, yes. Please see my edit above. Commented Jun 2, 2015 at 8:49
  • Thanks for adding the shortcode_parse_atts there. That did it! I updated your answer, so it works. Commented Jun 2, 2015 at 11:55

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