How to Check if a Post Has the Excerpt in WordPress

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July 24, 2023

As a WordPress user, have you ever wondered if a post on your website has an excerpt or not? The excerpt is a short summary or teaser of the post content that is often displayed on blog index pages or in search results. It can be quite useful for providing a brief preview of the post to readers. In this article, we will guide you through the process of checking if a post has an excerpt in WordPress. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced user, this tutorial will help you determine whether you need to add or modify an excerpt for your posts. So let’s dive in and learn how to check if a post has the_excerpt in WordPress.

					function wpturbo_has_excerpt($post_id) {
    $post = get_post($post_id);
    if (!empty($post->post_excerpt)) {
        return true;
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}

The code snippet provided is a function called wpturbo_has_excerpt() that checks if a given post has an excerpt or not. This function can be useful in various scenarios where you need to determine if a post has a manually created excerpt or not.

To start, the function takes a parameter $post_id which represents the ID of the post we want to check. Inside the function, we use the get_post() function to fetch the post object based on the provided post ID.

Next, we have an if-else statement to check if the post_excerpt property of the post object is empty or not. The post_excerpt property stores the manually created excerpt of a post. If it is not empty, indicating that an excerpt exists, the function will return true. Otherwise, if the post_excerpt is empty, the function will return false.

Let’s go into more detail on how the function works:

The function is defined with the name wpturbo_has_excerpt and takes one parameter called $post_id.
Inside the function, we use the get_post() function to retrieve the post object based on the provided $post_id. This function returns a WP_Post object that contains all the post data.
We then proceed with the conditional statement if (!empty($post->post_excerpt)). !empty() is a PHP function that checks if a variable is empty or not. In this case, we are checking if the post_excerpt property of the $post object is not empty.
If the post_excerpt is not empty, indicating that a manually created excerpt exists, the function will return true. This means that the post has an excerpt and can be used accordingly.
If the post_excerpt is empty, the function will return false. This means that the post does not have a manually created excerpt.

By utilizing this function, you can easily check whether a post has an excerpt or not and perform further actions or customization based on the result.

How to Check if a Post Has the Excerpt in WordPress

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