is therer any wordpress function to retrieve a specific html element from post content

Question

I am developing a wordpress blog theme and I want to use the heading1 element(tag) from post content to be used as the title for my posts instead of the default title. Actually, I want the title for my posts to be a little longer than the default title(which I require to set shorter for meeting SEO recommendations).

Probably I would need something like <?php get_the_tag(); ?>

instead of <?php the_title(); ?>

Answer 1

You can try extracting the content of the first H1 tag from your post.

function get_first_h1(){

    //Get filtered content of post
    ob_start();
    the_content();
    $content = ob_get_clean();

    //Define matching pattern: content of h1 tags
    $h1_pattern = "~<h1>(.*)</h1>~";

    //Variable to hold results
    $header_matches = array();

    //Search content for pattern
    preg_match( $h1_pattern, $content, $header_matches );

    //First match will be 2nd item in array (first is entire content, if any matches)
    if ( count( $header_matches ) > 1 ){
        return $header_matches[1];
    }

    //Fallback: return post title
    return get_the_title();

}

Notes:

• That function should be saved in functions.php, a custom plugin, or a file included in one of those
• Result of that function may be echoed out or used as part of another function , i.e. echo get_first_h1();
• That function, as written, must be used within a WordPress Loop

Personally, I like @Jacob Peattie's suggestion above better. Create a custom field to store the extra title field you want. I am providing this solution in case you must do it this way, i.e. you have 1,000's of posts and don't want to go set the title fields.