Intro

I am trying to apply a custom view to all the results of a visit to a taxonomy page, which involves wrapping the whole lot of results in some DOM boilerplate and then invoking the function to display each result as an element within that boilerplate. My strategy of choice was to step through each result, populated dynamically depending which taxonomy term has led them here, and fill a bucket with those results, then display each one appropriately.

In other words, I want the WordPress loop to tell me WHICH things to display, then my own iteration to decide HOW to display them. This seemed like a simple strategy, but loops like the following appear to be always displaying my bucket entire bucket, although I am nowhere telling it to actually print that bucket. Narrowing it down to a minimal example I have the following, which still is printing out $bucket. What is going on?

$bucket = array();
while ( have_posts() ) {
    the_post();
    $bucket[]=the_meta(); // this is all printed to the screen. Why?
}

Answer

From Ruvee@stackoverflow¹:

Wordpress has this concept of the_{name of function} and get_{thename of function}. For example, the_title and get_thetitle. the_title will echo out the title into the page but get_thetitle will return the title instead.

the_{name of function} will echo out the result. get_{thename of function}, on the other hand, will return the result.

Read more on that.

Using get_postmeta did indeed do what we needed, although I’m still flumoxed as to why the_meta is triggering a print that it doesn’t elsewhere in the code, and isn’t mentioned in the documentation. Perhaps it’s a feature of the theme we’re using.

Footnotes

¹ Question posted here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69050961/why-is-wordpress-printing-my-array-instead-of-just-constructing-it