Display the_excerpt only if there is text

By Austin on May 9, 2009

Have you ever wanted to display the excerpt only if you write one? A simple couple lines of code can display the_excerpt any where you like.

In my new theme, I am using this coded trick to display the excerpt on a single post only if I’ve got text inside. Usually if you use the_excerpt and you don’t have one, it will fake one for you.

This is not something that I wanted to do on the single post page. So I used the following code to check if the excerpt existed.

if ( !empty( $post->post_excerpt ) ) :

Once this action is taken into account, you can factor in what code you want to out put if the post_excerpt isn’t empty.

if ( !empty( $post->post_excerpt ) ) :
	the_excerpt();
else :
	false;
endif;

The above code checks if there is an excerpt and print’s it to the screen. If there isn’t an except, it doesn’t do anything.

Posted in Tips & Tricks | Tagged $post, post_excerpt, the_excerpt

This post written by Austin

A web designer and avid WordPress guru. Visit my personal blog, and please follow @WPCult on twitter for site updates. You can also follow me personally @TheFrosty.

2 responses to “Display the_excerpt only if there is text”

Tim
May 17, 2009 at 11:39 am | Permalink | Reply

Very helpful tip. I love the flexibility of WordPress and this is one more trick to have when working out a custom content display.
Thanks for posting this!

Tim

Tim´s last blog post..Disappearing Widgets – A Solution in WordPress 2.7
Andrew
September 17, 2009 at 6:10 am | Permalink | Reply

I’m trying to get this to work only
$returns = mysql_query($query);
$result = mysql_fetch_row($returns);
$post_title = $result[5];
$post_excerpt = $result[7];

display 2 titles and not the main decription or article body, any help please?
Andrew