Remove HTML entities from post slug during cleaning

[devansh016]

What?

This PR ensures that HTML entities, such as &, are properly decoded when generating post slugs. It modifies the getEditedPostSlug selector to decode entities in post titles before cleaning them for slug creation.

Why?

The current implementation adds unnecessary HTML entities like amp to slugs when saving drafts. This behavior can cause confusion and lead to unnecessarily long or SEO-unfriendly URLs. For example, a draft title containing & becomes /ampersand-amp-and/, but upon publishing, it correctly becomes /ampersand-and/. This PR fixes the inconsistency by decoding HTML entities before cleaning the slug.

Fixes #62543

How?

• Added decodeEntities from @wordpress/html-entities to the getEditedPostSlug selector.
• Updated the slug-cleaning process to decode HTML entities in the post title before passing it to cleanForSlug.

Code changes are minimal and located in packages/editor/src/store/selectors.js.

Testing Instructions

1. Go to Settings > Permalinks and set the permalink structure to "Post name".
2. Create a new post with a title containing special characters, e.g., Ampersand & And.
3. Save the post as a draft.
4. Check the generated URL in the editor sidebar.
   • Before: /ampersand-amp-and/
   • After: /ampersand-and/
5. Publish the post and confirm the URL remains /ampersand-and/.

Testing Instructions for Keyboard

Screenshots or screencast

Before	After

[github-actions]

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Co-authored-by: devansh016 <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Mamaduka <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: t-hamano <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: Soean <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: 2ndkauboy <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: annezazu <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: marcarmengou <[email protected]>

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[Mamaduka]

Thanks for contributing, @devansh016!

The referenced issue has a PR (#62549) with an ongoing review process. Just FYI.

[devansh016]

Thanks for contributing, @devansh016!

The referenced issue has a PR (#62549) with an ongoing review process. Just FYI.

Thanks, @Mamaduka! I’ve reviewed the other PR. My approach is slightly different, and the previous PR has been inactive for the past couple of months.

[t-hamano]

Hi, @devansh016. Thanks for the PR.

I've discovered that simply decoding HTML entities isn't enough. Besides HTML entities, there are many other characters that need to be handled.

For example, the slug of the title Hello—World (Hello—World) should be hello-world:

However, the slug becomes helloworld when the post is saved in the block editor:

In other words, as mentioned in this comment, we may need a JS function equivalent to sanitize_title_with_dashes() function.

[Mamaduka]

In other words, as mentioned in #62549 (comment), we may need a JS function equivalent to sanitize_title_with_dashes() function.

The cleanForSlug is supposed to be that function, but it seems it's not working as expected.

[APCgit]

Try updating a slug that has already been published, the result is completely different. When publishing you can handle the slug through PHP, but when updating a published post there is no php filter involved and this ends up in non transformed slugs with wrong umlauts and characters just removed. Its very inconsistent. Unfortunately I didnt find a way to filter the slug myself for the default ui. I added a custom input to handle umlauts and characters properly, but that's not how it should work...

[Mamaduka]

@APCgit, the cleanForSlug is more like a sanitize_title_with_dashes, but it also handles special accented characters.

There are a couple of reasons the method doesn't allow filtering the return value:

• It's more generic than sanitize_title and is used in multiple places to slugify text strings.
• As stated in the JSDoc block, the method returns an approximate slug, but eventually defers to slugs generated on the server.
• The sanitize_title_with_dashes also doesn't apply any filters.

[Mamaduka]

Thanks for the initial proposal, @devansh016!

I'm going to close this in favor of #70078.