Replace text in excerpt

Question

I have a separate theme for my custom WP install that will be use for mobile users, in my case I need to change an html tag in all the excerpt instances but without altering the DB, I found this simple function that would be perfect but I can't get it to work, nothing's happening.

function replace_content_on_the_fly($text){
$replace = array(
    // 'words to find' => 'replace with this'
    '<p>' => '<div>',
    '</p>' => '</div>'
);
$text = str_replace(array_keys($replace), $replace, $text);
return $text;
}
add_filter('the_excerpt', 'replace_content_on_the_fly');

I added the above code in my theme function.php. Why doesn’t it work?

Answer 1

You code works where the function the_excerpt is used. It does not work when get_the_excerpt is used, which does not apply the the_excerpt filter. It applies get_the_excerpt instead.

Using get_the_excerpt will cause the filter to apply to both the cases since the_excerpt() uses get_the_excerpt().

Automatically generated excerpt content is a different thing since it is created by a filter on get_the_excerpt that strips the markup.