Prevent Wordpress from abbreviating-long-slugs…-in-the-admin

Question

On post edit pages, when a slug exceeds a certain number of characters, Wordpress abridges it with an ellipsis (...). For example, if my slug is i-want-to-be-able-to-see-this-slug, it appears on the edit page like this:

Permalink: http://example.com/2012/i-want-to-be-a...-see-this-slug/ [ Edit ]

Can I prevent Wordpress from doing this?

I like to be able to see (and copy) a full URL without obfuscation, so I'm dying to find out how to get rid with this feature.

Answer 1

There is a filter at the end of the function: 'get_sample_permalink_html'. Hook into this and just replace the shortened form with the full length.

<?php # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
/* Plugin Name: T5 Unabridge Permalink Slug */

add_filter( 'get_sample_permalink_html', 't5_unabridge_sample_permalink', 10, 2 );

/**
 * Replaces the shortened permalink with its full form.
 *
 * @param  string $sample Permalink HTML
 * @param  int    $id Post ID
 * @return string
 */
function t5_unabridge_sample_permalink( $sample, $id )
{
    $link = get_sample_permalink( $id );
    $s1   = '<span id="editable-post-name" ';
    $s2   = '</span>';

    return preg_replace(
        '~' . $s1 . '([^>]*)>([^<]*)' . $s2 . '~Ui',
        $s1 . '$1>' . $link[1] . $s2,
        $sample
    );
}

Result

Post title: This is a rather long post title. WordPress would shorten it by default, but our nice plugin prevents that.

▶ Download from GitHub.

Answer 2

Its not possibel via filter or action hook, WordPress cut the strings hard in core. see wp-admin/includes/post.php line 1110 in WP 3.4alpha

if ( function_exists('mb_strlen') ) {
    if ( mb_strlen($post_name) > 30 ) {
        $post_name_abridged = mb_substr($post_name, 0, 14). '…' . mb_substr($post_name, -14);
    } else {
        $post_name_abridged = $post_name;
    }
} else {
    if ( strlen($post_name) > 30 ) {
        $post_name_abridged = substr($post_name, 0, 14). '…' . substr($post_name, -14);
    } else {
        $post_name_abridged = $post_name;
    }
}

You can open a ticket on the Trac of WordPress for include an filter.

Answer 3

As @bueltge notes in his answer, there's currently no filter or action hook that would allow this. Here is the hack I did to prevent ... abbreviation.

In the file wp-admin/includes/post.php, find this line (in Wordpress 3.4.1, it is line 1117):

$post_name_html = '<span id="editable-post-name" title="' . $title . '">' . $post_name_abridged . '</span>';

Change it to this:

// Changed $post_name_abridged to $post_name to prevent "..." abridgement of long slugs
$post_name_html = '<span id="editable-post-name" title="' . $title . '">' . $post_name . '</span>';

Of course, because this edits a core file, the change will be overwritten whenever a new version of Wordpress updates this file.

If anyone can recommend a non-core-hacking way to achieve this, I'd certainly use that over this.