Automattic / Automattic/syntaxhighlighter

Doubly-escaped HTML special characters in Plain Text blocks, also in old posts

Open
#286 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
[Type] Bug
Dominant language
CSS
Stars
251
Forks
81
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

### Steps to Reproduce

1. Create a Syntaxhighligher block containing the following:

```

bar &
```

2. Choose type "Plain Text".
3. Preview or publish

### What I Expected

Content displayed as:

```

bar &
```

### What Happened Instead

Content displayed as:

```
<foo>
bar &
```

### PHP / WordPress / SyntaxHighlighter Evolved version

* Debian 12
* PHP 8.2
* WordPress 6.7.2 running Twenty Fourteen theme
* SyntaxHighlighter Evolved 3.7.2

### Browser / OS version

* Any browser on any OS

### Screenshot / Video

~~A degraded public post from 2024: https://binblog.de/2024/03/04/failsafe-curl/~~ (No longer visible. Blog rolled back to 3.7.1.)

Reproducer from above:

![Image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/f76efca0-d63a-4284-b2e1-26961bbf1aba)

### Context / Source

Noticed just recently. Display degraded on all existing posts. Rolled back to version 3.7.1.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Research direction

No source file or test is named in the report. Reproduce the issue with a SyntaxHighlighter block set to Plain Text using the supplied and ampersand input, then compare version 3.7.2 with 3.7.1; done means previewed and published content displays each HTML special character only once escaped.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
php, wordpress
Domain
web-dev
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
42/100

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