Question

I have a shortcode inside a plugin I wrote. The shortcode always prints on top, after a bit of research I found that I have to ‘return’ instead of ‘echo’ for me to get it in the right place.

I have inline HTML , css , javascript in various script tags inside the PHP file. Is there a way I can get it work without trying to return all the inline HTML. (adding ‘return’ to all html tags is a huge endeavour) ?

I know that a question on shortcode printing on top has been asked but this is not entirely the same problem I am having.

Appreciate your answers.

Just for people to get an idea of the code I am dealing with: This is just a small chunk of the code, but there is html, css spread all over the place.

extract(shortcode_atts(array(
    'id'=>'0', 'key'=>'0'), $atts));


if(substr($id, -3) == "***") $id = substr($id, 0, 8);
$id_licenses = getDbInfo($id);

$id_desc = array();
if(is_array($id_licenses)) $id_desc = $id_licenses;
else $id_desc[0] = $id_licenses;

if(isset($_POST['desc'])) {     
    $info = $_POST['desc'];

    $ids = getDbInfoByDesc($info);
}




?>

<style type="text/css">
label.inputlabel
{
width: 8em;
float: left;
text-align: left;
margin-right: 0.5em;
display: block; 
padding-left: 0.5em;

font-family: Tahoma;
  }

Answer 1

You have to return the final result but if you want you can buffer the result and echo anything inside the buffer then can retun the buffered data, i.e.

function yourShortCodeFunction(){
    ob_start();
    echo "Hello"; // this will not print out
    // more code
    $result = ob_get_contents(); // get everything in to $result variable
    ob_end_clean();
    return $result;
}