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Formatting: introduce esc_attr_name() for HTML attribute name sanitization - #12915

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SainathPoojary:fix/43010

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@SainathPoojary

@SainathPoojary SainathPoojary commented Aug 6, 2026 •

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The HTML5 spec allows arbitrarily named attributes (e.g., data-*), but WordPress lacked a dedicated function to escape dynamically generated attribute names. Developers sometimes incorrectly used esc_attr() for this, which only escapes attribute values.

This PR introduces esc_attr_name() in formatting.php to resolve this. It uses a strict allowlist regex ([^a-zA-Z0-9_.:\[\]-]+/u) to strip any characters not explicitly permitted in an HTML attribute name per the HTML5 specification (such as spaces, quotes, control characters, <>, =, etc.).

Trac ticket: #43010

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SainathPoojary marked this pull request as ready for review August 8, 2026 12:27
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$safe_text = wp_check_invalid_utf8( $text, true );

$safe_text = preg_replace( '/[^a-zA-Z0-9_.:\[\]-]+/u', '', $safe_text );

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A couple of edge cases to consider here:

  1. Unicode Support: The regex restricts attribute names to ASCII only, but the WHATWG HTML specification allows valid non-ASCII/Unicode characters in attribute names. For instance, data-ñame currently gets stripped to data-ame.

  2. Empty Return Value: If $text contains only invalid characters (like spaces or quotes), esc_attr_name() returns an empty string "". When concatenated as <div " . esc_attr_name( $attr ) . '="val">, this results in malformed HTML (<div ="val">).

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