Embedding remote content in WordPress

Introduction

I wrote some C programs that I stored in Subversion and that I wanted to show in this article.

Initially, as an xfce4-terminal user, I was cat-ing the program, selecting the displayed text with the mouse, right-clicking, selecting ‘Copy as HTML’ and pasting into an empty pre-formatted block in WordPress.

Repeating that procedure each time I edited the C programs quickly became a pain but I did not want the version of the C programs in Subversion and the version of the C programs in WordPress to become misaligned. I had to find another way.

Things I tried that did not work

  • The ideal solution would probably be HTML5 supports imports, but I did not find support for them in WordPress or a plugin.
  • JSM’s file_get_contents() Shortcode plugin looked promising, but it mangled all occurrences of ‘<‘ and ‘>’ so that this: 
    #include <stdio.h>    /* included for printf() declaration */

    became this:

    #include     /* included for printf() declaration */

My incremental improvement to David’s solution

  1. Edit wp-functions.php or wp-config.php and add the following: 
    function show_remote_content_func( $atts ) {
    extract( shortcode_atts( array(
        'url' => '',
        'esc' => '',
        'pre' => ''
    ), $atts ) );
  
    if ($url == '') {
        return;
    }
    $contents = @file_get_contents($url);
    if ($esc == 'true') {
        $contents = esc_html($contents);
    }
    if ($pre == 'true') {
        $contents = '<pre>' . $contents . '</pre>';
    }
    return $contents;
}
add_shortcode( 'show_remote_content', 'show_remote_content_func' );
  2. In the page where you want to embed to remote content add: 
    [show_remote_content url="<some-url>" pre="true" esc="true"]

    Omit pre="true" and/or esc="true" as required.

See also