Issue with enabling formatting in excerpts in WordPress

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This is one of the reasons why HTML markup is removed from excerpts in the first place, to prevent such issues like this from occurring however, where there’s a will, there’s a way…

You can, through using regular expression, close the open tags applicable to the excerpt only and you might want to take a look at the following link for some ideas,

Close HTML Tags

Or alternatively you can use this plugin ready made for WordPress,

Advanced Excerpt

Or if you feel so inclined you can modify it or sample its structure and apply it to your function.

UPDATE

I decided to run a test, however please note that I’ve used a different function that I often use when creating excerpts with customizable lengths on the fly;

Put this into your functions.php file,

function content($limit) {
global $content;
  $content = explode(' ', get_the_content(), $limit);
  if (count($content)>=$limit) {
    array_pop($content);
    $content = implode(" ",$content).'...';
  } else {
    $content = implode(" ",$content);
  } 
  $content = preg_replace('/\[.+\]/','', $content);
  $content = apply_filters('the_content', $content); 
  $content = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $content);
  return $content;
}

followed by,

function closetags($html) {

  #put all opened tags into an array
  $content = $result;
  preg_match_all('#<([a-z]+)(?: .*)?(?<![/|/ ])>#iU', $html, $result);
 $openedtags = $result[1];   #put all closed tags into an array
  preg_match_all('#</([a-z]+)>#iU', $html, $result);
  $closedtags = $result[1];
  $len_opened = count($openedtags);
  # all tags are closed
  if (count($closedtags) == $len_opened) {
    return $html;
  }

  $openedtags = array_reverse($openedtags);
  # close tags
  for ($i=0; $i < $len_opened; $i++) {
    if (!in_array($openedtags[$i], $closedtags)){
      $html .= '</'.$openedtags[$i].'>';
    } else {
      unset($closedtags[array_search($openedtags[$i], $closedtags)]);    }
  }  
    return $html;
}

Then in your theme you would do the following,

<?php echo closetags( content(55) );?>

Where 55 = the length in words that you want your excerpt to be.

If you want to make use of the ACTUAL excerpt box within the post edit screen then you can also add this snippet to your functions file,

function excerpt($limit) {
global $excerpt;
  $excerpt = explode(' ', get_the_excerpt(), $limit);
  if (count($excerpt)>=$limit) {
    array_pop($excerpt);
    $excerpt = implode(" ",$excerpt).'...';
  } else {
    $excerpt = implode(" ",$excerpt);
  } 
  $excerpt = preg_replace('/\[.+\]/','', $excerpt);
  $excerpt = apply_filters('the_excerpt', $excerpt);
  $excerpt = str_replace(']]>', ']]&gt;', $excerpt);
  return $excerpt;
}

And its usage would be,

<?php echo closetags( excerpt(55) );?>

However if using the ACTUAL excerpt box in the post edit screen you would have to manually write your <strong>,<em>,<i>,<a>,etc.. tags of course! Unless you modify the default TinyMCE for the excerpt box.

So there you have it, you are covered in both instances, either…

1) grabbing an excerpt from the_content()
2) grabbing an excerpt from the_excerpt()

NOTE There might be a more efficient way to go about this by writing the functionality of the Close HTML Tags example by Milan in-case you wish to investigate that further.

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