Shortcode runs when editing page

Question

I have a page which only contains this:

[memberdirectory] [/memberdirectory]

It's purpose is to list names and addressed of members. It loads and runs the associated function without any problem. My problem is that when I went to change the page the shortcode is executed when the page is loaded for editing. In other words, when I pick the page on the dashboard to edit. This happening is not a killer, just an inconvenience. I must not understand something about shortcodes and when they run. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks,

Answer 1

I've faced a similiar situation on couple of occasions. In my case the shortcode getting rendered on the text editor was caused by the shortcode echoing instead of returning its content.

As noted on add_shortcode Codex entry,

Note that the function called by the shortcode should never produce output of any kind. Shortcode functions should return the text that is to be used to replace the shortcode. Producing the output directly will lead to unexpected results. This is similar to the way filter functions should behave, in that they should not produce expected side effects from the call, since you cannot control when and where they are called from.

My suggestion is that you double-check the output of the shortcode so that it returns stuff instead of echoing it.

If it's echoing the output and you don't feel like rewriting everything, you could wrap the echos inside output buffer, like so.

function some_shortcode( $atts, $content = null ) {

  // start output buffer, which will hold all the following echoed html
  ob_start();

  // old code echoing html

  // return html content from buffer and clear buffer
  return ob_get_clean();

}

If this doesn't help, then please share your code so the community can have a better look at it.