WordPress embeds in AJAX inserted content

Question

I have a page that is calling in the content from other posts (a custom post type, specifically) and inserting it into the page. It all works great, but I'm losing the functionality of WordPress taking youtube (and other embeddable links) and automatically inserting the embedded video.

I've tried apply_filters( 'the_content', $my_content );, but I think that filter isn't even available via admin-ajax.php.

I of course already call do_shortcode( $my_content ), but what can I use, in similar fashion, to get the embeddable links to embed?

UPDATE:

In response to bonger's answer, I've updated the code to this:

wpautop( do_shortcode( $wp_embed->run_shortcode( $my_content ) ) )

($wp_embed was globalized before this line of code)

Note that the wpautop() and do_shortcode() are totally irrelevant to this issue, but I put them in here just for completeness. This code is outputting the youtube url as a link to the youtube video, but not embedding the video in the page.

Answer 1

I think the solution is amazingly simple here:

You're just missing a single line of code in your ajax callback, namely:

global $post;

where I assume you're using:

$post = get_post( $post_id );

The reason is that there's a global post check in the WP_Embed::shortcode() method.

More details in my answer here.

Answer 2

I think there's some weirdness with [embed] shortcodes where you have to run them through WP_Embed::run_shortcode(), eg

    if ( strpos( $my_content, '[embed]' ) !== false ) {
        global $wp_embed;
        $my_content = $wp_embed->run_shortcode( $my_content );
    }
    $my_content = do_shortcode( $my_content );

Update: however as no providers are registered this won't work as you noticed(!), so I think the easiest thing to do is to call wp_oembed_get() direct:

            $args = array();
            global $content_width;
            $args['width'] = $content_width ? $content_width : 300;
            // Simplistic parse - look for a url on its own line.
            $lines = explode( "\n", $my_content );
            foreach ( $lines as $i => $line ) {
                $line = trim( $line );
                if ( stripos( $line, 'http' ) === 0 ) {
                    if ( $oembed_html = wp_oembed_get( $line, $args ) ) {
                        $lines[$i] = $oembed_html;
                    }
                }
            }
            $my_content = implode( "\n", $lines );

You may want to use transients to avoid repeated calls to the provider - here's a version of stuff I use:

// Wrapper around wp_oembed_get() to use transients.
function wpse175427_oembed_get( $url, $args ) {
    global $wpse175427_oembed_transient_expiration;
    if ( $wpse175427_oembed_transient_expiration ) {
        $transient_key = md5( $url . '_' . wpse175427_reduce_array( $args ) );
        if ( $oembed_html = get_transient( $transient_key ) ) {
            return $oembed_html;
        }
    }

    //add_filter( 'oembed_fetch_url', 'wpse175427_oembed_fetch_url', 10, 3 );
    //add_filter( 'oembed_result', 'wpse175427_oembed_result', 10, 3 );
    if ( $oembed_html = wp_oembed_get( $url, $args ) ) {
        if ( $wpse175427_oembed_transient_expiration ) {
            set_transient( $transient_key, $oembed_html, $wpse175427_oembed_transient_expiration );
        }
        return $oembed_html;
    }
    return '';
}

// Helper to stringify args array (for transient key).
function wpse175427_reduce_array( $arr ) {
    $ret = array();
    foreach ( $arr as $key => $val ) {
        $ret[] = '`' . $key  . '`=`' . $val . '`';
    }
    return implode( ',', $ret );
}

Then set the global in your ajax callback, eg

            global $wpse175427_oembed_transient_expiration;
            $wpse175427_oembed_transient_expiration = DAY_IN_SECONDS;

and call wpse175427_oembed_get() instead of wp_oembed_get().

Answer 3

try to use get_the_content(), like:

$my_content = get_the_content();
$my_content = apply_filters('the_content', $my_content);