Make shortcode work with nested double quotes

Question

I have following shortcode:

function infobox_shortcode( $atts, $content = null ) {

    extract( shortcode_atts( array(
      'src' => '',
      'title' => '',
      'text' => '',
    ), $atts, 'infobox' ) );

    $return = '<div class="infobox clearfix"><div class="col-md-1 infobox-image"><img src="'.$src.'" alt="'.$title.'"/></div><div class="col-md-8 infobox-content"><h2> ' . $title . '</h2><p>' . $text . '</p></div></div>';

    return $return;

}
add_shortcode( 'infobox', 'infobox_shortcode' );

This works fine, when the user uses it simple like so:

[infobox src="http://www.google.com" title="Google" text="Some description"]

But:

As soon as the users tries to add e.g. a link with quotes to the shortcode, it - of course - breaks:

[infobox src="http://www.google.com" title="Google" text="Some description - see more: <a href="http://www.google.com">More here</a>"]

Issue is that my user uses the WP Editor to add a link and this makes double quotes. Alsor WordPress seems to delete single quotes for attributes by default and adds double quotes which then again break my shortcode.

Right now I see 2 solutions for this, but both are not quite satisfying.

a) Tell WP not to convert single quotes to double quotes in a href links while saving a post or b) To make the shortcode work with double quotes.

Any other hints or workarounds I can go with this?

Thanks!

Mike

Answer 1

Either way this seems like a very clunky solution for arbitrary markup in shortcode.

If only one of attributes is more bulky and includes markup I would consider making shortcode enclosing:

[infobox src="http://www.google.com" title="Google"]
    Some description - see more: <a href="http://www.google.com">More here</a>
[/infobox]

You might be to the point when you'll need to built custom UI or it will just be too error prone for users.