Convert special HTML entities in characters in widgets descriptions

[justinahinon]

Follow up of this issue ​https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/31023 on Gutenberg.

WordPress doesn't decode the HTML entities in widgets descriptions, so these one show as that in Gutenberg widget screen.

This appears in Archives, Recent posts, Meta, Recent comments widgets.

Fixes Trac ticket https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/53138

[prbot]

​JustinyAhin commented on ​PR #1220:

Looks like there are some PHPCS issues

[audrasjb]

Yes @justinahinon, you can't use a PHP function inside a gettext function.

__( html_entity_decode( 'Your site’s most recent Posts.' ) )

Should be replaced with something like:

html_entity_decode( __( 'Your site’s most recent Posts.' ) )

Moving for 5.8 consideration since it's related to trunk.

[justinahinon]

Thank you, @audrasjb.

I have updated the PR.

[audrasjb]

Great, it looks good to me :)

[audrasjb]

Marking this for commit consideration.

[whyisjake]

In 51114:

Widgets: Ensure that HTML entities are converted in widget descriptions.

Fixes #53138.

Props justinahinon, audrasjb.

[prbot]

​whyisjake commented on ​PR #1220:

Closed with #51114

[SergeyBiryukov]

Thanks for the patch! However, I don't think [51114] is the correct approach here:

• It does not account for translations. These four widgets are just the ones that have entities in their English description, translations may add or remove entities, so decoding them only for some of the widgets is not a consistent solution.
• It does not account for custom widgets. Any custom widgets that have entities in their description would still run into the same issue.

If the block editor displays these descriptions somewhere without decoding entities first, it should be fixed there, on display, consistently for all widgets, and not in the individual widgets' constructors. So I would recommend reverting [51114] for now.

[hellofromTonya]

As @SergeyBiryukov notes, the patch needs more work. Also could use automated tests and testing.

As today is 5.8 Beta 1, punting to 5.9 to continue work towards resolution.

[whyisjake]

In 51127:

Widgets: Don't decode HTML entities ahead of the widget constructor.

This reverts the changes from [51114].

See #53138.

Unprops whyisjake.

[ramonopoly]

I've created a patch over at #53407 as an alternative approach.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Closing in favor of #53407, which has a new patch and a unit test.