Is it possible to remove the filter from 4.8 text widget?

Question

The new rich text widget that came with the 4.8 update seems to add a filter to widget's content before outputting the data (probably the_content).

I just noticed that if i use a shortcode in the new text widget, it will mess the entire thing ( for example, it will replace the X letter with × which is the HTML entity equivalent for × mark, add random <p>, etc.). The filter is added to the wp_options table under widget_text, like this:

a:2:{
    i:2;
    a:3:{
        s:5:"title";
        s:6:"Sample";
        s:4:"text";
        s:14:"[shortcode-here]";
        s:6:"filter";
        s:7:"content";
    }
    s:12:"_multiwidget";
    i:1;
}

Now if i replace the 5th and 6th values with this:

    s:1:" ";
    s:1:" ";

The filter is applied no more. If you already have a text widget added before updating to 4.8, there won't be a problem. But the moment you click Save on the widget after you update to 4.8, the problem appears.

I don't want to disable the filter entirely, since there might be other text widgets on the page.

Is it possible to detect the shortcodes and turn off the filter for them?

Answer 1

We now have a new filter widget_text_content introduced in 4.8 ^src, with the following default callbacks:

add_filter( 'widget_text_content', 'capital_P_dangit', 11 );
add_filter( 'widget_text_content', 'wptexturize'          );
add_filter( 'widget_text_content', 'convert_smilies',  20 );
add_filter( 'widget_text_content', 'wpautop'              );

that are applied if the filter settings, for the widget instance, is set to 'content'.

When you remove the filter settings by hand from the wp_options table, it seems to be reset during the update method ^src.

See trac ticket #35243 for more info.