remove empty tags from wordpress shortcodes via a php functon

Question

Looking for a php function (non-jQuery or wpautop modification) approach to remove

from within wordpress.

I tried this but it does not w

Answer 1

This is an old question, but I solved this today and thought I'd share.

In my case, I basically want to remove all the poorly formatted <p> and <br> tags, but then you want to add them back in correctly so that the text in the shortcode gets formatted correctly.

/*
 * Half column shortcode
 */
    function custom_shortcode_half_column( $atts, $content = '') {
        $content = custom_filter_shortcode_text($content);
        return '<div class="half-column">'. $content .'</div>';
    }
    add_shortcode( 'half-column', 'custom_shortcode_half_column' );


/*
 * Utility function to deal with the way WordPress auto formats text in a shortcode.
 */
    function custom_filter_shortcode_text($text = '') {
        // Replace all the poorly formatted P tags that WP adds by default.
        $tags = array("<p>", "</p>");
        $text = str_replace($tags, "\n", $text);

        // Remove any BR tags
        $tags = array("<br>", "<br/>", "<br />");
        $text = str_replace($tags, "", $text);

        // Add back in the P and BR tags again, remove empty ones
        return apply_filters('the_content', $text);
    }

This really should be the default way WordPress parses the shortcode $content parameter in my opinion.