Behind The Blog

Today we had a wee bit of fun with HTML tables… Jeremy, a member of our support team, published a post on our Voxeo Developer’s Corner blog that had an HTML <table> in it. Now it turned out that this was the first time in the 10 months that we’ve had this blog site up that anyone has used a <table> tag… and WordPress MU wasn’t terribly happy about it! What happened is that WPMU inserted a <br/> tag at the end of every line of HTML in the table. Annoyingly, the BR tags were inserted outside of the <TD> tags with the result being that a browser bizarrely interpreted the BRs to be a bunch of blank lines before the table.

Naturally I blamed Rick’s CSS file for lacking some table handling and he of course blamed all my plugins for messing up the formatting. A Google search helped us find out that the answer was neither but instead was actually WordPress itself.

This web page started out with the key heading “Disabling WordPress’ slap-happy approach to <br /> tags” and provided the answer. That web page is for WordPress 2.0.2 and we’re now running the equivalent of WP 2.5, so the file is no longer functions-formatting.php but instead simply formatting.php. As before it lives in <WPMU>/wp-includes.

Inside the file starting at line 62 was this:

function wpautop($pee, $br = 1) {
        $pee = $pee . "\n"; // just to make things a little easier, pad the end
        $pee = preg_replace('|<br />\s*<br />|', "\n\n", $pee);

One simple change of “$br = 1″ to “$br = 0″:

function wpautop($pee, $br = 0) {
        $pee = $pee . "\n"; // just to make things a little easier, pad the end
        $pee = preg_replace('|<br />\s*<br />|', "\n\n", $pee);

and… ta da… the BR tags went away and the table no longer had this mass of white space before it.

Fun, fun, fun…. (well, not really)

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Tags: WordPress, wordpressmu, WPMU

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