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Preserve Code Formatting

by Scott Reilly on WordPress.org

Preserve formatting of code for display by preventing its modification by WordPress and other plugins while also retaining whitespace.

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A screenshot of the plugin's admin options page.

A screenshot of the plugin's admin options page.

This plugin preserves formatting of code for display by preventing its modification by WordPress and other plugins while also retaining whitespace.

NOTE: This plugin does NOT handle posts containing blocks. For such posts, use the built-in code or preformatted blocks to format your code for display. However, this plugin would still be needed if you have text-based posts from before using the blocks-based editor.

NOTE: Use of the visual text editor will pose problems as it can mangle your intent in terms of code tags. I strongly suggest you not use the visual editor in conjunction with this plugin as I have taken no effort to make the two compatible.

Notes:

Basically, you can just paste code into code, pre, and/or other tags you additionally specify and this plugin will:

  • Prevent WordPress from HTML-encoding text (i.e. single- and double-quotes will not become curly; “–” and “—” will not become en dash and em dash, respectively; “…” will not become a horizontal ellipsis, etc)
  • Prevent most other plugins from modifying preserved code
  • Prevent shortcodes from being processed
  • Optionally preserve whitespace (in a variety of methods)
  • Optionally preserve code added in comments

Keep these things in mind:

  • ALL embedded HTML tags and HTML entities will be rendered as text to browsers, appearing exactly as you wrote them (including any br tags).
  • By default this plugin filters ‘the_content’ (post content), ‘the_excerpt’ (post excerpt), and ‘get_comment_text (comment content)’.

Example:

A post containing this within code tags:

$wpdb->query("
        INSERT INTO $tablepostmeta
        (post_id,meta_key,meta_value)
        VALUES ('$post_id','link','$extended')
");

Would, with this plugin enabled, look in a browser pretty much how it does above, instead of like:

$wpdb->query(—
INSERT INTO $tablepostmeta
(post_id,meta_key,meta_value)
VALUES ('$post_id','link','$extended')
―);

Links: Plugin Homepage | Plugin Directory Page | GitHub | Author Homepage

Active installations500+
Weekly downloads
211+681.48%
Version5.0
Last updated8/15/2025
WordPress version5.5
Tested up to6.8.2
Tags
codecontentescapeformattingpost
Preserve Code Formatting | Plugin0