Prevent WordPress shortcode execution within pre and code tags

Shortcodes are very powerfull tools in WordPress, at least they were because they are less popular since Gutenberg has arrived with WordPress 5.0.

I’m still using shortcodes in some rare cases (in one of my plugins for example) and when I need to write an article on how to use it, I want to be able to show example without executing it.

The above function allows to convert shortcodes braces in html characteres to prevent there execution when they are within the <code> or <pre> tags (the ones use to display code snippets). That mean the following [shortcode] will be converted to &#91;shortcode&#93; when your post HTML will be generated, but the browser will still display it as [shortcode].

function bweb_replace_shortcode($string) {
    $replace = array( '[' => '[', ']' => ']' );
    $newstring = str_replace( array_keys( $replace ), array_values( $replace ), $string[2] );
    return $string[1] . $newstring . $string[3];
}
function bweb_prevent_shortcode( $content ) {
	$pattern = '#(<pre.*?>|<code.*?>)(.*?)(<\/pre>|<\/code>)#imsu';
	return preg_replace_callback( $pattern, 'bweb_replace_shortcode', $content );
}
add_filter( 'the_content', 'bweb_prevent_shortcode', 9);

The function only affects the “display” of your content, it does not alter your content in database.