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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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Formatting: introduce esc_attr_name() for HTML attribute name sanitization#12915
SainathPoojary wants to merge 2 commits into
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SainathPoojary:fix/43010

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@SainathPoojary

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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


This Pull Request is for code review only. Please keep all other discussion in the Trac ticket. Do not merge this Pull Request. See GitHub Pull Requests for Code Review in the Core Handbook for more details.

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github-actions Bot commented Aug 6, 2026

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SainathPoojary marked this pull request as ready for review August 8, 2026 12:27
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@irozum irozum left a comment

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Nice addition — esc_attr_name() fills a real gap since esc_attr() only ever escaped values, not names, and the allowlist regex correctly strips all the characters that would let an attacker break out of the attribute-name context (quotes, =, <, >, /, whitespace, control chars). I checked out the branch, ran the new test file (33/33 pass) plus composer lint:errors and composer phpstan — both clean on the changed files (the pre-existing lint failures are in unrelated files).

One functional issue: src/wp-includes/formatting.php:20 (preg_replace( '/[^a-zA-Z0-9_.:\[\]-]+/u', '', $safe_text )) can return null instead of a string. wp_check_invalid_utf8( $text ) is called with the default $strip = false, so on a site whose blog_charset isn't UTF-8, is_utf8_charset() short-circuits it to return $text unmodified even if it contains invalid UTF-8 bytes. Those bytes then hit preg_replace() with the /u modifier, which returns null on invalid UTF-8 rather than throwing — I verified this directly (preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9_.:\[\]-]+/u', '', "caf\xE9")NULL). That breaks the documented @return string contract. esc_attr()/esc_html() don't have this problem because _wp_specialchars() matches with a non-/u (byte-safe) pattern instead. Worth either passing wp_check_invalid_utf8( $text, true ) to always strip invalid bytes up front, or coalescing a null result from preg_replace() to ''. The test suite doesn't catch this because PHPUnit runs with the UTF-8 default charset.

Also, @since 7.1.0 on both the function and the esc_attr_name filter doc is likely wrong — trunk is currently 7.1-RC2 (feature-frozen), and other new hooks/functions already in trunk are tagged @since 7.2.0 (e.g. comment.php's recent additions), so this should probably target 7.2.0 too.

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