Function Reference/the excerpt

Displays the excerpt of the current post after applying several filters to it including auto-p formatting which turns double line-breaks into HTML paragraphs. It uses get_the_excerpt() to first generate a trimmed-down version of the full post content should there not be an explicit excerpt for the post.

The trimmed-down version contains a 'more' tag at the end which by default is the […] or "hellip" symbol. A user-supplied excerpt is NOT by default given such a symbol. To add it, you must either modify the raw $post->post_excerpt manually in your template before calling the_excerpt(), add a filter for 'get_the_excerpt' with a priority lower than 10, or add a filter for 'wp_trim_excerpt' (comparing the first and second parameter, because a user-supplied excerpt does not get altered in any way by this function).

See get_the_excerpt() for more details.

An auto-generated excerpt will also have all shortcodes and tags removed. It is trimmed down to a word-boundary and the default length is 55 words. For languages in which words are (or can be) described with single characters (ie. East-Asian languages) the word-boundary is actually the character.

Note: If the current post is an attachment, such as in the attachment.php and image.php template loops, then the attachment caption is displayed. Captions do not include the "[...]" text.

Usage

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

This template tag must be used within The Loop.