Title: Problem with shortcode identification?
Last modified: August 19, 2016

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# Problem with shortcode identification?

 *  [laogeodritt](https://wordpress.org/support/users/laogeodritt/)
 * (@laogeodritt)
 * [17 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/bug-in-shortcode-identification/)
 * I’ve written up some shortcodes for our site/blog, and noticed a persistent problem.
   It seems to be due to an oversight in the shortcode-matching code in WordPress;
   the shortcodes aren’t being recognized correctly, it seems.
 * This shortcode can have either be self-closing or contain content.
 * I’ve replaced it with a simple return of the $content between brackets to identify
   what was being matched as the shortag’s content (second argument of the short
   tag function). Page examples below.
 *     ```
       <dl>
       <dt>[team name="person1"]Person1[/team]</dt>
       <dd>Founder, Coordinator</dd>
       <dt>[team name="SomePerson" /]</dt>
       <dd>Artist</dd>
       (A few more)
       <dt>[team name="Pookie" /]</dt>
       <dd>Artist</dd>
       <dt>[team name="Ray"]Raymund[/team]</dt>
       <dd>Artist</dd>
       </dl>
       ```
   
 * The first one in this example will be identified fine. For the second, however,
   it’s detected as being `</dt>\n<dd>Artist</dd>` all the way up to `Raymund`, 
   where it sees the [/team] tag. Same thing is I replace the XHTML-style self-closing
   tag with a full [/team] tag without content.
 * I’ve taken a look at line 170 of wp-includes/shortcodes.php, but if I try to 
   make it recognize EITHER the self-closing slash or the close tag, but not both,
   it ends up returning nothing (I get blank output for the post content; no errors
   in the log, the rest of the page outputs). The modified code I use is:
 * `return '\[('.$tagregexp.')\b(.*?)(?:(\/\])|(?:(.+?)\[\/\1\]))';`
 * Has anyone else encountered this problem? Is there anything I haven’t thought
   of, here, or is my only option to forego the shorthand and use the full shortcode(
   or make another one for shorthand)?
 * And what exactly causes my regex to fail?
 * Thanks in advance for any help,
    — Laogeodritt

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## Tags

 * [shortcode](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/shortcode/)

 * 0 replies
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [laogeodritt](https://wordpress.org/support/users/laogeodritt/)
 * Last activity: [17 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/bug-in-shortcode-identification/)
 * Status: not resolved

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