commentcodeplugin.md

gistfile1.md

IDEA: WordPress Plugin for Improving Leaving Code in Comments

It's always quite a struggle to keep people doing it correctly on CSS-Tricks, so I'd love if there was a plugin to make it more foolproof.

The overall idea: make it so if you use <code> tags, it will come out perfectly.

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1) Automatically escape code that isn't escaped

<code><h3>whatever</h3></code>

becomes

<code>&lt;h3>Whatever&lt;/h3></code>

2) NOT escape code that is already escaped

<code>&lt;h3>Whatever&lt;/h3></code>

stays

<code>&lt;h3>Whatever&lt;/h3></code>

3) Automatically wrap code that has a line break in it in <pre> tags if it isn't already

<code><ul>
<li></code>

becomes

<pre><code><ul>
</li><code></pre>

4) Make sure there isn't a line break as the first or last character in the code block

<pre><code>
<ul>
  <li>
</code></pre>

becomes

<pre><code><ul>
  </li><code></pre>

5) Make sure no tags go unclosed

<code>
   <h1>Example

becomes

<code>
   <h1>Example</h1>
</code>

How should nested code tags be treated?

I would think that if you wrote:

<code>
   <code></code>
</code>

you are literally trying to show someone code tags, so the inner ones should be escaped.

Relevant: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/balanceTags

This function works with regexes and for a limited set of elements only. You need a real HTML parser.

For number 2, you probably just need to pass "false" for the double_encode parameter to htmlspecialchars

Just a thought, but what about creating a shortcode function and instructing your commenters to use that? That way you'd have complete control over what happens inside it without having to modify how the other portions of the comments act.