Question

I was coding a simple metabox for wordpress and have a little issue when saving data.

The meta box is in my “create article”-page has two textfields. These are saved as post-meta, when the post is saved.

While saving I check if the fields were filled – if they are empty I take the post title and extract the data I need. The idea is to take everything that is before the first “-“. If there is no minus sign, the whole title should be saved in my custom field. Now, this fails to find “-” in the title (alltough there is one) and returns the whole title every time:

function get_from_title($title) {
  $pos = strpos($title, '-');

  if ($pos) {
    return trim(substr($title, $pos));
  }
  else {
    $pos = strpos($title, '–'); //added this since two different signs could be used

    if ($pos) {
      return trim(substr($title, $pos));
    }
    else {
      return $title;
    }
  }
}

the function that is calling get_from_title is getting the title via get_the_title( $post_id ) and this works without problems.

Is wordpress encoding the title somehow? Why can’t strpos find the minus sign? What should I look for instead?

Thanks

Answer 1

I replied to the thread you started on this topic in the WordPress forums. You can find your answer there.

Alternatively, here’s what I said. 🙂

Ah yes. This is a tricky one. So, why can’t strpos find a hyphen in
the title when clearly we can see one? Because there isn’t one. hehe.

What WordPress is doing here is converting your hyphen ( minus sign )
into an en-dash.

This will give you diddly-squat:
$pos = strpos( $title, '-' );

You want this:
$pos = strpos( $title, '–' );

Let me know how things turned out for you. 🙂