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WordPress WordPress Theme Development Adding a Blog to a WordPress Theme Coding the Blog Homepage

Richard Walton
Richard Walton
10,861 Points
Posted by Richard Walton
Richard Walton
10,861 Points

Why is PHP adding the <p> tag?

so we are showed how to fix it, but why did PHP add those tags causing the problem in the first place? Is there a way to set the page up so that it doesn't do it in the first place?

1 Answer

geoffrey
geoffrey
28,736 Points
geoffrey
geoffrey
28,736 Points

Hi Richard, the fact that parapgrahs are added with the the_excerpt wordpress function is due to the way this function is coded inside wordpress with PHP, I don't know why they chose to build this function this way as It's easy to add paragraph tags.

However, I "investigated" a little bit and I found that while the the_excerpt function automatically adds paragraph tags, It's not the case with the get_the_excerpt function. So there is no need to strip tags as Zac showed in the video.

Once again I don't know why they chose to include them with one of the two function and not the other.

Moreover, It's not that much an issue if you use the strip_tags() function even if there are no tags to strip.

In conclusion just use:

<h2><?php echo get_the_excerpt(); ?></h2>

FInally if you want a hack to delete the paragraph tags with the the_excerpt function, here is a topic.