Custom metabox – strpos not finding the "-" character in the post title

  • cavka

    (@cavka)


    11 years, 7 months ago

    I was coding a simple metabox for wordpress and have a little issue when saving data.

    The meta box is in my “create article”-page and has two textfields. These are saved as post-meta, when the post is saved.

    While saving I check if the fields were filled – if they are empty I take the post title and extract the data I need. The idea is to take everything that is before the first “-“. If there is no minus sign, the whole title should be saved in my custom field. Now, this fails to find “-” in the title (alltough there is one) and returns the whole title every time:

    function get_from_title($title) {
  $pos = strpos($title, '-');

  if ($pos) {
    return trim(substr($title, $pos));
  }
  else {
    $pos = strpos($title, '–'); //added this since two different signs could be used

    if ($pos) {
      return trim(substr($title, $pos));
    }
    else {
      return $title;
    }
  }
}

    the function that is calling get_from_title is getting the title via get_the_title( $post_id ) and this works without problems.

    Is wordpress encoding the title somehow? Why can’t strpos find the minus sign? What should I look for instead?

    Thanks

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Spencer Cameron-Morin

    (@spencercameron)

    11 years, 7 months ago

    Ah yes. This is a tricky one. So, why can’t strpos find a hyphen in the title when clearly we can see one? Because there isn’t one. hehe.

    What WordPress is doing here is converting your hyphen ( minus sign ) into an en-dash.

    This will give you diddly-squat:
    $pos = strpos( $title, '-' );

    You want this:
    $pos = strpos( $title, '& #8211;' );

    I put a space between the & and #8211; so the browser wouldn’t render it. Remove that space in your code and everything should work just fine.

    Let me know how things turn out. 🙂

    Thread Starter cavka

    (@cavka)

    11 years, 7 months ago

    No luck. It’s still giving me the full title (I have a title with both en and em dash and tried & #8211; with and without &, # and ; ans also for 8212). Just in case, this is the rest of the relevant code:

    add_action('save_post', 'mytheme_save_data');
// Save data from meta box
function mytheme_save_data($post_id) {
    global $meta_box;
    // verify nonce
    if (!wp_verify_nonce($_POST['mytheme_meta_box_nonce'], basename(__FILE__))) {
        return $post_id;
    }
    // check autosave
    if (defined('DOING_AUTOSAVE') && DOING_AUTOSAVE) {
        return $post_id;
    }
    // check permissions
    if ('page' == $_POST['post_type']) {
        if (!current_user_can('edit_page', $post_id)) {
            return $post_id;
        }
    } elseif (!current_user_can('edit_post', $post_id)) {
        return $post_id;
    }
    foreach ($meta_box['fields'] as $field) {
        $old = get_post_meta($post_id, $field['id'], true);
        $new = $_POST[$field['id']];
        if ($new && $new != $old) {
            update_post_meta($post_id, $field['id'], $new);
        } elseif ('' == $new) {
	    update_post_meta($post_id, $field['id'], get_the_title( $post_id ));
        }
    }
}
    Spencer Cameron-Morin

    (@spencercameron)

    11 years, 7 months ago

    Did you remove the space from in between the & and #8211?

    If yes, than would you mind copy pasting the code you tried as per my instructions? I’m confident we can get a resolution to this. 🙂

    Thread Starter cavka

    (@cavka)

    11 years, 7 months ago

    arrrrgh. that’s my second stupid mistake today. I’m not even calling get_from_title()… *facepalm*

    turns out, my code works fine if I’m actually using it.

    Spencer Cameron-Morin

    (@spencercameron)

    11 years, 7 months ago

    Awesome. I’m glad to hear you’ve got it working. 🙂

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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