Title: Avoiding automatic markup insertion/generation
Last modified: August 19, 2016

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# Avoiding automatic markup insertion/generation

 *  [svendtofte](https://wordpress.org/support/users/svendtofte/)
 * (@svendtofte)
 * [17 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/avoiding-automatic-markup-insertiongeneration/)
 * Hello,
 * I’m a new user of WordPress, trying to get things to “look” right. But I’m seeing
   that WP does some automatic formatting of my text, such as inserting line breaks
   whenever I hit enter, and also wrapping text in paragraph tags.
 * Now since I’m a competent HTML guy, and also wanting to control my markup quite
   tightly, this is a bit annoying. Now, looking around the code, I can see the 
   function “the_content” seems to apply the line breaks and other stuff in the 
   second line, where it goes
 * $content = apply_filters(‘the_content’, $content);
 * Now, it would be simply to comment this section out, but as I’m quite new to 
   this, I wonder if there’s another way to go about it (also, it’s hard for me 
   to “picture” the consequences of commenting the above code out). So any advice
   from seasoned users of WP?

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

 *  [Roger Theriault](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rogertheriault/)
 * (@rogertheriault)
 * [17 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/avoiding-automatic-markup-insertiongeneration/#post-800614)
 * It may be time to embrace CSS and XHTML.
 * But you can remove specific filters. remove_filter, see here: [http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API](http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API)
 *  Thread Starter [svendtofte](https://wordpress.org/support/users/svendtofte/)
 * (@svendtofte)
 * [17 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/avoiding-automatic-markup-insertiongeneration/#post-800688)
 * I’m not sure what you mean by embracing CSS and HTML. But thanks for the tip 
   on remove_filter, it lead me to wpautop, which I’ve killed.
 * At least for now, I’m more comfortable inserting my own paragraph tags and defining
   my own HTML line breaks, should I want any.
 *  [Roger Theriault](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rogertheriault/)
 * (@rogertheriault)
 * [17 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/avoiding-automatic-markup-insertiongeneration/#post-800689)
 * You can adjust paragraph spacing and such with CSS if you don’t like the look
   of the output. The TinyMCE editor isn’t perfect but it does allow people to focus
   on their writing and content versus how that stuff gets arranged. And you mentioned
   HTML… which is different from [XHTML](http://www.sustainablewebdesign.com/resources/592/).
 *  [flick](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mosey/)
 * (@mosey)
 * [17 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/avoiding-automatic-markup-insertiongeneration/#post-800692)
 * You might consider looking at this [Raw HTML](http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/12/13/raw-html-in-wordpress/)
   plugin, which was one of the many solutions posted by [Bentrem](http://codex.wordpress.org/User:Bentrem/EditorScratch).
 * If you do find any of the solutions useful, it would be great if you could share
   your final choice with everyone 😉
 *  [Roger Theriault](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rogertheriault/)
 * (@rogertheriault)
 * [17 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/avoiding-automatic-markup-insertiongeneration/#post-800694)
 * I will admit I’ve had some cursing moments dealing with trying to just post a
   few code snippets. The “Code” part of the editor is the culprit, it’s not really
   nice to markup when you need to add complex markup (hence the dozens of YouTube
   and Flash code insert plugins).
 * At least it tries to make clean xhtml, unlike Microsoft Word! (I had a customer
   blindly pasting stuff from Word using Ctrl-V, too bad the editor can’t just intercept
   that, she never noticed the “Paste from Word” button. And I had to wipe out a
   whole pile of nested overlapping divs and spans for her.)
 *  Thread Starter [svendtofte](https://wordpress.org/support/users/svendtofte/)
 * (@svendtofte)
 * [17 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/avoiding-automatic-markup-insertiongeneration/#post-800710)
 * Well, I have been making web pages for near on 10 years, and yes I know the differences
   between XHTML and HTML (and use extensive CSS), but I assume we’re all technical
   people here, and honestly, potato, potato (doesn’t really translate into type
   does it?). I’m not spamming my websites with stuff infused with either -moz-*
   or mso-* 😉 I merely mean to say that I feel comfortable controlling my own markup.
 * But obviously I do want to use a CMS, since there’s alot of stuff I just don’t“
   need” in my life, some of that would include getting entity codes for the various
   danish characters I might use, and so forth. And I’m sorry if it came across 
   as any “slam” on WP or one of it’s components, I just have alot of legacy content
   on my site (residing in raw php files, no pre-processing done), which is fully
   marked up, including lots line breaks for readability.
 * At the moment, I’m using the wpautop function, but it feels strange to write 
   header tags, anchors, etc, but no paragraph tags. I think I’ll see how I like
   it. But in terms of my old content, changing it’s markup to fit WP would obviously
   be a bit of a hassle. Would be nice to have it be optional.
 * Or even better, have the “HTML” tab of the editor box MEAN pure markup, instead
   of, as it seems now “some markup”.
 * Anyway, I’m brand new to WP, so haven’t even looked at the plugin aspect at all.
   So I have some things to dig into. But thanks again for the clues to where I 
   can tweak these things (and I’ll let you guys know what I end up with, if it 
   can be of any help to others).
 *  [flick](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mosey/)
 * (@mosey)
 * [17 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/avoiding-automatic-markup-insertiongeneration/#post-800713)
 * [@svendtofte](https://wordpress.org/support/users/svendtofte/): As you can see(
   esp from the page) there are many who also struggle with the WYSIWYG interface.
   I think the WP one is better than most, but it can be very frustrating to see
   something that worked changed automatically. Imho, if a plugin can do the job,
   I’d use a plugin. This saves me having to edit core WP everytime I upgrade. However,
   it is also easy to become too reliant on plugins.
 * Good luck!
 *  [Roger Theriault](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rogertheriault/)
 * (@rogertheriault)
 * [17 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/avoiding-automatic-markup-insertiongeneration/#post-800715)
 * The filters are there to protect a user’s site from the user. One missing `</
   b>` and the rest of the page gets bold text, etc… Otherwise someone would have
   to build syntax checking and toss up warnings that would… confuse most of those
   users. And I’m betting someone said “half these users forget to close the `<p
   >` tag… why not relieve them of that problem?”.
 * If you look through the forum you’ll see plenty of folks trying to modify php
   and css and wordpress function calls with very little knowledge of what they 
   are doing. No knock on them (except I think just a few of them need to take a
   minute to learn some basics; I certainly don’t open the hood of my truck, go 
   at it with a hammer and saw, and then ask mechanics why my changes didn’t make
   my truck go faster 🙂 but that’s who folks like mosey and I are used to answering
   questions for. And I for one don’t want them to give up… otherwise I wouldn’t
   bother answering those questions. (Even when it’s against my better judgment…)
   Sorry if I initially assumed you might need a bit of guidance with XHTML.
 * By the way I think there is a plugin that disables wpautop, but if you put the
   same functional code in functions.php in your theme directory, it accomplishes
   the same thing without an extra plugin waiting to break on upgrade. And without
   an upgrade tossing any code hacks. (remove_filter should be around for a few 
   versions I’d assume).

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

The topic ‘Avoiding automatic markup insertion/generation’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [markup](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/markup/)
 * [nl2br](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/nl2br/)

 * 8 replies
 * 3 participants
 * Last reply from: [Roger Theriault](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rogertheriault/)
 * Last activity: [17 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/avoiding-automatic-markup-insertiongeneration/#post-800715)
 * Status: not resolved

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