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Display the_excerpt only if there is text

By Austin On May 9, 2009 Under Tips & Tricks

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.

2 Comments Add yours

  1. Tim
    May 17, 2009
    11:39 am

    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

  2. Andrew
    September 17, 2009
    6:10 am

    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