WP_Query won't retrieve raw HTML?

Question

I have a WordPress page named Services where the content is custom HTML (added in the Text tab in TinyMCE). I'm trying to use WP_Query on the splash page to pull the Services content and display it inside a DIV. What I'm getting however is plain text. It looks like WP_Query is parsing the HTML and then displaying what is left. The URL is not public, but here is my PHP recommended by the theme tech support (ElegantThemes/Vertex) ...

<section class="home-block et-odd">
<div class="container">

<?php $the_query = new WP_Query( 'page_id=4' ); ?>
<?php while ($the_query -> have_posts()) : $the_query -> the_post();  ?>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
<?php endwhile;?>

</div> <!-- .container -->
</section>

Answer 1

WP_Query object contains FULL content of posts/pages retrieved from database. No HTML tags are being removed. Therefore, the following statement in your question:

It looks like WP_Query is parsing the HTML and then displaying what is left.

is not true.

If you use, in your code, the_content() instead of the_excerpt() function, you'll see that all original HTML tags are preserved.

It is important to understand how excerpts are being generated. What is being displayed by the_excerpt() function? This is the code:

echo apply_filters( 'the_excerpt', get_the_excerpt() );

get_the_excerpt() function is responsible for generation of the excerpt's text.

From Codex:

Returns the excerpt of the post. This is either a user-supplied excerpt, that is returned unchanged, or an automatically generated word-counted trimmed-down version of the full post content.

The auto-generated excerpts have all shortcodes and tags removed which means it is just an unformatted string that would not see any line-breaks in any form of output, since the actual line-breaks in the raw text are also removed.

In your case, the_excerpt() function displays an auto-generated excerpt, with HTML tags removed. To change this behavior, you can use 'the_excerpt' filter to add HTML formatting, or fill page's Excerpt meta-box, with desired, HTML formatted text.