Shortcode and whitespace formatting problem

Question

I'm having a problem with shortcodes on a website, currently you enter a shortcode in the post edit screen like the following:

[tab name=Itinerary]

This will output a tab such as:

However as you can see in the image above we get "travel" and "useful" when using the shortcodes below:

[tab name=Travel Info] or [tab name=Useful Info] 

So the problem seems to be in the whitespace and the formatting. I've tried adding a "&/nbsp;" or [tab name="Travel Info"] but these solutions quickly fail. This is the function in functions.php that seems to be taking the information from the post screen:

// Tab Shortcode, creates a tab of information:
// [tab name=tab_name]
function page_tab_func( $atts ) {
    $a = shortcode_atts( array(
        'name' => 'Untitled'
    ), $atts );

    $spec_chars = array("/", "@", "#", " ");
    $sanitised = str_replace($spec_chars, "_", $a['name']);

    // $a['name']; // Gets the tab name:
    $output = "";
    $output .= "</div>";
    $output .= "<div id='content_{$sanitised}' class='tab-section'>";
    $output .= "<h2 class='tab-name'>{$a['name']}</h2>";
    return $output;
}

add_shortcode( 'tab', 'page_tab_func' );
add_filter( 'no_texturize_shortcodes', 'ignore_tag_a' );

    function ignore_tag_a( $list ) {
      $list[] = 'tab';
      return $list;
    }

I've searched Google and spent some time trying to solve this problem, if anyone has any advice in dealing with shortcode formatting or fixing this problem I'd greatly appreciate it.

Answer 1

You should give the Attributes Section of the Shortcode API WordPress Codex page a read.

Unquoted values also must never contain spaces.

Short summary, use quotes - either " or ' - for attribute values with a space in it. Because an attribute name isn't actually needed I think the »Info« part of your name will be an extra part of your $atts array, stored with a numeric index, so the array likely looks somewhat like this: array( 'name' => 'Travel', 0 => 'Info' ).

Before you say, but I tried quotes, let me say, there is no reason visible why it wouldn't work with using quotes around the value.