WordPress: Displaying C-like hexadecimal prefix “0x” correctly

This is a small, but annoying thing about WordPress. They obviously didn’t consider the “0x” hexadecimal notation. What they did consider, was that if someone says “2x2″ that surely means “2 times 2″, so why not making that “x” in the middle fancy? Well, maybe because that makes “0x123″, which is a hexadecimal number, look weird.

The fix is in the core PHP files of WordPress, so this probably needs to be fixed every time WordPress is updated.

In wp-includes/formatting.php, in the wptexturize() function, probably around lines 50-51 there’s something like:

$dynamic_characters = array('/\'(\d\d(?:’|\')?s)/', '/(\s|\A|")\'/', '/(\d+)"/', '/(\d+)\'/', '/(\S)\'([^\'\s])/', '/(\s|\A)"(?!\s)/', '/"(\s|\S|\Z)/', '/\'([\s.]|\Z)/', '/\b(\d+)x(\d+)\b/');
$dynamic_replacements = array('’$1','$1‘', '$1″', '$1′', '$1’$2', '$1“$2', '”$1', '’$1', '$1×$2')

The last entry in both arrays replaces two numbers with an “x” between them with a fancy “times” symbol (Unicode character #215). So just remove those two entries from both arrays (marked in red above). Remove the commas as well, of course.

Maybe the 100% correct way to fix this, is to use a better regular expression, instead of ‘/\b(\d+)x(\d+)\b/’. I’m not sure about regular expressions in PHP, but in Perl I would try ‘/\b([1-9]\d*)x(\d+)\b/’, so it wouldn’t match the “0x” notation. It wouldn’t match “02 x 2 = 4″ or any other number prefixed with zeros, but this is not something normal people write anyhow.