How To Customize Excerpts in WordPress to Remove the […] Programmatically

WordPress has some smart features that also require customization. WordPress’s “Excerpt” feature is one such feature. This Excerpt can be best controlled by using the More tag. However, in widgets and some templates where Excerpt is auto-generated, the normal output of the More tag is not taken into account. This is why WordPress has provided us with relief. The limitations of “Excerpt” can be overcome by using custom functions in the functions.php file in your child theme.

What are Excerpts in WordPress?

Excerpts are small summaries or gist of the full post or page content that will give your post audience an overview of what your post is all about. By default, a WordPress theme displays automatically generated excerpts that will show the first few characters of your content including a “read more” link. These excerpts are generated via the WordPress function:

Remove […] completely

To completely remove […] from Excerpt, open the functions.php file in your child theme and paste the following code:

function webtechriser_trim_excerpt( $text )
{
	return rtrim( $text, '[…]' );
}
add_filter( 'get_the_excerpt', 'webtechriser_trim_excerpt' );

Replace […] with …

The following lines of code will replace “[…]” with “…“:

function webtechriser_trim_excerpt( $text )
{
	return str_replace( ' […]', '…', $text );
}
add_filter( 'get_the_excerpt', 'webtechriser_trim_excerpt' );

Replace […] with “Read more…”

This snippet will provide you with a “Read more…” instead of “[…]” from the Excerpt.

function webtechriser_trim_excerpt( $text )
{
	return str_replace( ' […]', '' . ' Read more…', $text );
}
add_filter( 'get_the_excerpt', 'webtechriser_trim_excerpt' );

Customize Excerpt’s […] of Custom Post Type (CPT)

When you’re working with “Custom Post Type” (CPT), you can still customize Excerpt’s “[…]” string to your liking, although the WordPress function works for all Excerpts globally.

function webtechriser_change_excerpt( $more ) {
	if ( post_type_exists( 'news' ) ) {
		return '';
	}

	return '…';
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_more', 'webtechriser_change_excerpt' );

Here in this small snippet in your functions.php, I have managed to replace the “[…]” string of the excerpt of ‘news’ CPT with a “blank” space. However, this function won’t touch excerpts of all other posts and pages and peacefully return the “…” string.

Wrapping up

Although this small function of customizing Excerpt’s […] string is very small, it is a necessary and effective function of WordPress. I hope you find this tutorial useful for your theme.