Display the post excerpt.
Displays the excerpt of the current post after applying several filters to it including auto-p formatting which turns double line-breaks into HTML paragraphs. It uses get_the_excerpt() to first generate a trimmed-down version of the full post content should there not be an explicit excerpt for the post.
The trimmed-down version contains a ‘more’ tag at the end which by default is the […] or “hellip” symbol. A user-supplied excerpt is NOT by default given such a symbol. To add it, you must either modify the raw $post->post_excerpt manually in your template before calling the_excerpt(), add a filter for 'get_the_excerpt' with a priority lower than 10, or add a filter for 'wp_trim_excerpt' (comparing the first and second parameter, because a user-supplied excerpt does not get altered in any way by this function).
See get_the_excerpt() for more details.
An auto-generated excerpt will also have all shortcodes and tags removed. It is trimmed down to a word-boundary and the default length is 55 words. For languages in which words are (or can be) described with single characters (ie. East-Asian languages) the word-boundary is actually the character.
Note: If the current post is an attachment, such as in the attachment.php and image.php template loops, then the attachment caption is displayed. Captions do not include the “[…]” text.
Excerpts provide an alternative to the use of the <!--more--> quicktag. Whereas this more tag requires a post author to manually create a ‘split’ in the post contents, which is then used to generate a “read more” link on index pages, the excerpts require, but do not necessarily demand, a post author to supply a ‘teaser’ for the full post contents.
The <!--more--> quicktag requires templates to use the_content() whereas using excerpts requires, and allows, template writers to explicitly choose whether to display full posts (using the_content()) or excerpts (using the_excerpt()).
The choice of whether to display a full post or an excerpt can then be based on factors such as the template used, the type of page, the category of the post, etcetera. In other words, with a <!--more--> quicktag the post author decides what happens, whereas the template writer is in control with excerpts. Moreover, although <!--more--> can be used to create a real split using the $stripteaser parameter, it would be hard and complicated to then differentiate based on characteristics, causing this to become a basically site-wide choice.
File: wp-includes/post-template.php
function the_excerpt() {
/**
* Filters the displayed post excerpt.
*
* @since 0.71
*
* @see get_the_excerpt()
*
* @param string $post_excerpt The post excerpt.
*/
echo apply_filters( 'the_excerpt', get_the_excerpt() );
} | Version | Description |
|---|---|
| 0.71 | Introduced. |
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Licensed under the GNU GPLv2+ License.
https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/the_excerpt