Snippet/shortcode moves on content page

Shortcodes should always return their output. You are using echo within your shortcode, add your output to a variable and return it.

Thanks for the reply. I’m not a coder, so I’ll have to do more research about outputting to a variable. I got this far by trial and error.

It seems that my code snippet loads too early, before the content of my webpage is loaded. Is there a way to tell the snippet not to load before the content?

Some sort of do_action that tells my snippet to run later and allow the MySQL result to appear in the text box, where I placed the snippet?

I think I understand a little better now. Short Codes require me to convert the query into a string and then output using “result”, not echo or print?

Sorry, I’ve been away and so couldn’t answer this earlier. Essentially, for shortcodes, you need to make sure that you do not directly output any content (using echo or print), and instead use return to pass your content to the page.

There are a few ways you can do this. The first is to use a variable for storing the output, and add to this variable:

function fl_aries_co_today_shortcode() {
	global $wpdb;
	$results = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT table FROM wplx_scope_co WHERE date = CURDATE() AND sign = 'ar'");
	$output = '';
	
	foreach ($results as $r) {
		$output .= "<p>" . $r->table . "</p>";
	}
	
	return $output;
}
add_shortcode( 'fl_aries_co_today','fl_aries_co_today_shortcode' );

This is the best and fastest method, however there are some cases where you can’t store your output in a variable – such as when you are calling a function that always echos its output. In this case, you can use output buffering. Here’s how that would look in that example:

function fl_aries_co_today_shortcode() {
	global $wpdb;
	$results = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT table FROM wplx_scope_co WHERE date = CURDATE() AND sign = 'ar'");
	
	ob_start();
	
	foreach ($results as $r) {
		echo "<p>" . $r->table . "</p>";
	}
	
	return ob_end_clean();
}
add_shortcode( 'fl_aries_co_today','fl_aries_co_today_shortcode' );

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Shea Bunge.

Amazing, works perfectly. Thank you so much!

No problem; glad you could get it working!