Rewrite title as: Extract HTML and WordPress shortcodes as array of objects

Question

I'm developing a headless WordPress website using Nuxt as the frontend.

The website has thousands of articles with shortcodes. I get all the page data via graphql and render the content using v-html and everything is fine, but the shortcode apparently only renders as plain text.

Most of them are very simple shortcodes, so I will create Vue components to replace them

<component :is="someshortcode">

What I need to do is split my html into an array of objects that I can use to render parts of the page into html or into components, depending on what it is.

I think the best way to do this is to use regular expressions, and this is where I'm confused.

Suppose I have the following html and some shortcodes

<h1>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h1>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>
<h2>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h2>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>

[someshortcode attr1="value1" attr2="value2"]

<h2>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h2>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>
<h2>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h2>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>

[someshortcode attr1="value1" attr2="value2"]

<h2>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h2>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>
<h2>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h2>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>

What I want to do is return an array of objects as shown below

[
    {
        type: 'html',
        content: `<h1>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h1>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>
<h2>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h2>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>`
    },
    {
        type: 'shortcode',
        content: `[someshortcode attr1="value1" attr2="value2"]`
    },
    {
        type: 'html',
        content: `<h1>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h1>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>
<h2>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h2>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>`
    },
    {
        type: 'shortcode',
        content: `[someshortcode attr1="value1" attr2="value2"]`
    },
    {
        type: 'html',
        content: `<h1>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h1>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>
<h2>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h2>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>`
    },
]

This is the base of what I need and then I will be able to break down the shortcode further by getting properties etc.

What is the best way to solve this problem? Are regular expressions the best approach?

Answer 1

You can use a DOM parser and iterate over the top elements of the DOM. If such an element is a text node and has shortcode format, create a separate object for it in the output array, otherwise get iterate over the HTML of the element and accumulate it if it is not a shortcode, and finally output it as an object:

const html = `<h1>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h1>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>

[someshortcode attr1="value1" attr2="value2"]

<h2>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h2>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>

[someshortcode attr1="value1" attr2="value2"]

<h2>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</h2>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus facilisis elit ante. Vivamus semper dui eget justo viverra facilisis. Etiam ut leo fermentum, sagittis mauris nec, placerat lorem.</p>`;

const {body} = new DOMParser().parseFromString(html, 'text/html');
let content = "";
const arr = [];
for (const child of [...body.childNodes]) {
    if (child.nodeType === 3 && child.textContent.trim()[0] == "[") {
        if (content) arr.push({ type: "html", content });
        content = "";
        arr.push({ type: "shortcode", content: child.textContent.trim() });
    } else {
        content += (child.outerHTML ?? child.textContent);
    }
}
if (content) arr.push({ type: "html", content });
console.log(arr);