Should I escape wordpress functions like the_title, the_excerpt, the_content

by

I had look at the code but I couldnt see any escaping on funcions like the_title the_content the_excerptetc. I might not be reading it right. Do I need to escape these functions in theme development like:

esc_html ( the_title () )

Edit: as pointed out in the answers below the above code is wrong regardless – the code should have read
esc_html ( get_the_title () )

3

Escaping depends entirely on the context in which you are using the functions. What is safe for displaying inside <h1> tags, is not necessarily safe to display for the value attribute of an input field, and even that wouldn’t necessarily be safe as a href attribute value….

In short – perform the sanitisation yourself as you output it. Though in the case of the_title () or get_the_title (), esc_html is not necessary, since WordPress applies the following functions:

  • convert_chars
  • wptexturize

Note: the_title prints the title – so esc_html ( the_title () ) won’t work. Similarly, the_content prints the content (in any case, you’d expect the content to display HTML).

Leave a Comment