Echo HTML in custom shortcode

Question

I wrote a shortcode that I am trying to refine. It basically just gets a list of bookmarks and prints them. But I need to to add HTML around it depending on the type that is defined.

extract(shortcode_atts(array('cat' => '', 'type' => ''), $atts));

$bookmarks = get_bookmarks( array(
  'orderby'  => 'name',
  'order'    => 'ASC',
  'category' => $cat
));

if (is_single()){
  if($type == 'audio'){echo '<div class="sub-audio"><h6 class="sub_btn">Audio</h6>';}
  if($type == 'video'){echo '<div class="sub-video"><h6 class="sub_btn">Video</h6>';}
  foreach ( $bookmarks as $bookmark ) { 
    printf( '<a class="wpb_button_a" href="%s"><span class="wpb_button wpb_%s wpb_default2"><i class="icon-%s"> </i>%s</span></a>', $bookmark->link_url, $bookmark->link_name, $bookmark->link_name, $bookmark->link_name );
  }
  echo '</div>';
}

So depending on whether I define the type as either audio or video it should output HTML according to the type. But I am not sure why this isn't working.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I don't know what "this isn't working" means but a shortcode should not echo anything. You should concatenate a string and return it.

if (is_single()){
  $str = '';
  if($type == 'audio'){
    $str .= '<div class="sub-audio"><h6 class="sub_btn">Audio</h6>';
  }
  if($type == 'video'){
    $str .= '<div class="sub-video"><h6 class="sub_btn">Video</h6>';
  }
  foreach ( $bookmarks as $bookmark ) { 
    $str .= sprintf( 
      '<a class="wpb_button_a" href="%s"><span class="wpb_button wpb_%s wpb_default2"><i class="icon-%s"> </i>%s</span></a>', 
      $bookmark->link_url, 
      $bookmark->link_name, 
      $bookmark->link_name, 
      $bookmark->link_name 
    );
  }
  $str .= '</div>';
}
return $str;

I don't see anything else obviously wrong, though the code you posted is incomplete, so I am guessing that that is the problem.