Remove Line Breaks from List Elements in Wordpress

November 2nd, 2009

Posted in: Web Development

Ok, so for some reason, Wordpress insists on outputting cleanly-formatted code (with tabs, line breaks, and everything). The problem I have, is that with this site where the navigation area is an inline-list, these line breaks are translated into spaces between the elements. Combine this with the background hover effect on the elements, and you get a bunch of buttons with spaces between content and right border.

I end up having to tweak this every time I update the site, and compounding this is the fact that between updates, I consistently forget exactly how to do it. Anyways, here’s how:

  1. Open up wp-includes/classes.php.
  2. Find the Walker_Page class.
  3. Find the end_el function of the Walker_Page class.
  4. Change remove the \n from $output .= “</li>\n”;.
  5. Save and upload the file.

Yes, I’m aware that this should probably be remedied by creating a custom function in my template that formats the output correctly, but that would require a delving into Wordpress’s class structure that I find much more daunting than just deleting two characters from a file after each update. This fix works on both Wordpress MU, and regular Wordpress.

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