Categories: Tips & Tricks

Display the_excerpt only if there is text

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.

Web Master

Hi, I am Miguel, I bought this site in 2009. So I now run or manage the site. Please visit my new website or follow me on twitter @W3i.

View Comments

  • 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

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