Strings in the_field

• kaOlaRSAN

• October 22, 2014 at 11:17 pm

We’re building a multilingual site where the client wants to be able to change a lot of text in the admin – such as buttons – rather than having it defined in the theme. We’re using ACF option pages for this.

I haven’t been able to figure out if there is a way to have a dynamic element to fields. Say we have a button that looks like this:

Back to [event category] overview page

The client wants to change the text of the button, but how can I add the dynamic variable (name of event category) in the field output? Its placement might change depending on language, so ideally I would like to write something like this in ACF admin:

Back to %s overview page

And then in the theme, do something like:

the_field('my-ACF-field-value', $my-event-category-variable);

Is this possible?

• John Huebner

• October 23, 2014 at 7:41 am

maybe
printf(get_field('my-ACF-field-value'), $my_event_category_variable);

• kaOlaRSAN

• October 23, 2014 at 5:03 pm

Thanks a lot Hube2! That worked, I just needed to add the option-call and all is fine:

printf(get_field('my-ACF-field-value', 'option'), get_the_title($post->post_parent));

I thought ACF probably didn’t use %s and this wouldn’t be possible, but I’m happy I was wrong. Amazing plugin, I am continuously impressed the more I learn about it.

• John Huebner

• October 24, 2014 at 12:08 am

Actually, ACF does not handle the %s and printf stuff internally.

If we break it down to steps:

1. Get your field value that contains %s
2. Get the value to replace %s with
3. call PHP pringf() function using the retrieved values

• kaOlaRSAN

• October 24, 2014 at 7:45 pm

Aha, so it’s handled outside of ACF. But still it doesn’t stop the functionality – often I find plugins get in the way of many base functions.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply!