WordPress: How to Remove and Prevent Line Feeds and Carriage Returns in Titles

You may have encountered line feeds or carriage returns inserted into the post titles when creating or editing in WordPress. These extra characters can cause formatting issues and make your titles appear inconsistent. In this article, I’ll provide two methods to remove line feeds and carriage returns from your WordPress post titles: a MySQL solution to fix previously written titles and a PHP function to prevent the issue from occurring in the future.

Method 1: MySQL Solution for Previously Written Titles

If you have existing posts with line feeds or carriage returns in their titles, you can use a MySQL query to update them all at once. Here’s the query:

UPDATE wp_posts
SET post_title = REGEXP_REPLACE(post_title, '(\\w)\\r?\\n(\\w)', '$1 $2')
WHERE post_status = 'publish';

The MySQL query provided in the article uses the REGEXP_REPLACE() function, which is available in MySQL 8.0 and later versions. Therefore, to use the MySQL solution as-is, your server must have MySQL 8.0 or above installed.

If you are using an older version of MySQL (prior to 8.0), you can achieve a similar result by using a combination of REGEXP_SUBSTR() and CONCAT() functions instead. Here’s an alternative query that works with older MySQL versions:

UPDATE wp_posts
SET post_title = CONCAT(
    REGEXP_SUBSTR(post_title, '^[^\\r\\n]+'),
    IF(REGEXP_SUBSTR(post_title, '\\r?\\n'), ' ', ''),
    REGEXP_SUBSTR(post_title, '[^\\r\\n]+$')
)
WHERE post_status = 'publish';

Explanation:

Before running the query, make sure to replace wp_posts with your actual WordPress posts table name and back up your database as a precaution.

Method 2: Child Theme Function to Prevent Future Occurrences

To prevent line feeds and carriage returns from being saved in post titles moving forward, you can add a PHP function to your WordPress child theme’s functions.php file. Here’s the function:

function remove_line_feeds_from_post_title($data, $postarr) {
    if (isset($data['post_title'])) {
        $data['post_title'] = preg_replace('/(\w)\r?\n(\w)/', '$1 $2', $data['post_title']);
    }
    return $data;
}
add_filter('wp_insert_post_data', 'remove_line_feeds_from_post_title', 10, 2);

Explanation:

With this function in place, whenever a post is saved or updated, any line feeds or carriage returns within the post title will be automatically removed or replaced with spaces before saving to the database.

By using the MySQL query to fix existing post titles and adding the PHP function to your child theme, you can ensure that your WordPress post titles are free from unwanted line feeds and carriage returns, maintaining a consistent and clean appearance on your website.

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