About this plugin
Generate Custom Outputs with HTML Comments
Commentcode API lets you generate custom outputs with HTML comment-like codes.
It is similar to the Shortcode API except it takes a form of HTML comments and some few features.
Since it takes a form of HTML comments, even the user disables your plugin, the embedded code will not be visible, on contrary to shortcodes that remain in posts when their plugins are deactivated.
Does not leave a mess in posts
Say, you have been using a plugin that converts a plugin specific shortcode into custom outputs. Later you found something else that is more useful and uninstalled it.
But the shortcodes used by that plugin remained in hundreds of posts and it was too much work to manually delete them so you have to ask somebody to run SQL commands.
That’s a problem. What if the shortcode takes a form of an HTML comment? It won’t leave such a mess.
Syntax
It looks like this.
--- tag foo="bar" --->
--- /tag --->
Notice that tripe dashes are used in the both opening and closing part. So it won’t hardly conflict with generic HTML comments.
Supports Multi-dimensional Array Arguments
The shortcode cannot pass multi-dimensional arguments to the callback function.
The below attributes won’t be parsed.
[my_shortcode foo[1]="one" foo[2]="two"]
However, commentcode can handle it.
---my_shortcode foo[1]="one" foo[2]="two" --->
The attributes are interpreted as
array( 'foo' => array( 1 => 'one', 2 => 'two', ) )
Preserved Letter Cases
The shortcode does not allow capitalized attribute names.
[my_shortcode CapitalName="I need it to be capitalized"]
The attribute is interpreted as
array( 'capitalname' => 'I need it to be capitalized', )
This is not useful when you need to perform remote API requests which require argument names with capital letters.
However, the commentcode API preserves those argument names.
" --->
will be
', )
Register a Commentcode
Use the add_commentcode() function. It accepts two parameters.
1. (string) the commentcode tag.
2. (callable) a callback function which gets called when the commentcode of the specified tag is processed.
The callback function receives three parameters.
1. (string) The filtered text, usually an empty string.
2. (array) The attributes set in the commentcode.
3. (string) The commentcode tag name.
function get_my_commentcode( $text, $arguments, $tag ) { return "<pre>". htmlspecialchars( print_r( $arguments, true ) ). "</pre>"; } add_commentcode( 'my_commentcode', 'get_my_commentcode' );
---my_commentcode Foo="bar" numbers[ 1 ]="one" numbers[ 2 ]="two"---> in a post.
It will produce this output,
Array ( [Foo] => bar [numbers] => Array ( [1] => one [2] => two )
)