How to Change the […] in WordPress’ the_excerpt Hook

WordPress’ “the_excerpt()” hook has a long track record of annoying people.  On the one hand, it is a totally awesome way to grab a quick summary of the article.  On the other hand, it totally sucks, because it doesn’t provide any options (a.k.a. “parameters”).  By default, it leaves the equivalent of pigeon droppings on your blog in the form of “[…]” appearing after your blog’s summary.

Thankfully, there are a couple of ways to address the issue.  The best way to get some options in the_excerpt is to install The Excerpt Reloaded plugin, which allows for all sorts of customizations that should be included in the native the_excerpt.

But if you just need to change the “[…]” to something of your choosing, using a simple function like this is probably a better option.  I used the funtion method on a website today – just popped the provided lines of code into my functions.php file – and it worked like a charm!

// Edit the_excerpt
function gpp_excerpt($text) { 
	return str_replace('[...]', '... 
Read the rest of this entry »', $text); 
} 
	
add_filter('the_excerpt', 'gpp_excerpt');