So Gutenberg, the future of WordPress content editing, allows users to create, add and re-use blocks in posts and pages in a nice UI. These blocks are added in WordPress’ the_content inside HTML-comments to ensure backwards-compatibility. For WP YouTube Lyte I needed to extract information to be able to replace Gutenberg embedded YouTube with Lytes and I took the regex-approach. Ugly but efficient, no?
But what if you need a more failsafe method to extract Gutenberg block-data from a post? I took a hard look at the Gutenberg code and came up with this little proof-of-concept to extract all data in a nice little (or big) array:
add_action('the_content','gutenprint',10,1); function gutenprint($html) { // check if we need to and can load the Gutenberg PEG parser if ( !class_exists("Gutenberg_PEG_Parser") && file_exists(WP_PLUGIN_DIR."/gutenberg/lib/load.php") ) { include_once(WP_PLUGIN_DIR."/gutenberg/lib/load.php"); } if ( class_exists("Gutenberg_PEG_Parser") && is_single() ) { // do the actual parsing $parser = new Gutenberg_PEG_Parser; $result = $parser->parse( _gutenberg_utf8_split( $html ) ); // we need to see the HTML, not have it rendered, so applying htmlentities array_walk_recursive($result, function (&$result) { $result = htmlentities($result); } ); // and dump the array to the screen echo "<h1>Gutenprinter reads:</h1><pre>"; var_dump($result); echo "</pre>"; } else { echo "Not able to load Gutenberg parser, are you sure you have Gutenberg installed?"; } // remove filter to avoid double output remove_filter('the_content','gutenprint'); // and return the HTML return $html; }
I’m not going to use it for WP YouTube Lyte as I consider the overhead not worth it (for now), but who know it could be useful for others?