Passing variables that contain HTML through the t() function - ! placeholder has been removed

Question

In Drupal 8, it appears that using the ! (exclamation mark) placeholder with the t() function has been removed.

I have a variable that contains HTML:

<span class="fullname_wrapper"><span class="first_name">John</span> <span class="last_name">Hancock</span> <span class="account_name_wrapper">(@JohnH)</span></span>

I want to keep this HTML, as it will be styled specifically wherever it appears on the site.

In Drupal 7, I was able to do this:

t('Your name is !name', array('!name' => $name));

In which $name contains the HTML shown above. However, in Drupal 8, this doesn't work since the exclamation mark pass-through placeholder has been removed.

I tried this:

t('Your name is :name', array(':name' => $name));

But the HTML is still escaped.

The @ mark also escapes the HTML.

Does anyone know how HTML can be passed through the t() function in D8?

UPDATE:

According to No Sssweat's comment, it seems that my the ! mark does seem to work in t(). So here is my actual code:

drupal_set_message(
  $this->t(
    "@amount has been transferred to !account",
    array(
      '@amount' => '¥' . $form_state->getValue('amount'),
      '!account' => $this->accountService->formatAccountName($account)
    )
  )
);

And I get this error stack:

User error: Invalid placeholder (!account) in string: @amount has been transferred to !account in Drupal\Component\Render\FormattableMarkup::placeholderFormat() (line 235 of core/lib/Drupal/Component/Render/FormattableMarkup.php).

Drupal\Component\Render\FormattableMarkup::placeholderFormat('@amount has been transferred to !user', Array) (Line: 204)
Drupal\Core\StringTranslation\TranslatableMarkup->render() (Line: 15)
Drupal\Core\StringTranslation\TranslatableMarkup->__toString() (Line: 451)
drupal_set_message(Object) (Line: 128)

The user error is what made me think the ! mark is not allowed, but I must have misdiagnosed it. Does anyone know what is happening here?

Answer 1

It appears that any arguments passed to t() function are escaped unless they implement MarkupInterface. So that you need to represent the name as an object.

use Drupal\Component\Render\FormattableMarkup;

$formatted_name = new FormattableMarkup(
  '<span class="fullname-wrapper">
    <span class="first-name">@first_name</span>
    <span class="last-name">@second_name</span>
    <span class="account-name-wrapper">(@user_name)</span>
   </span>',
  [
    '@first_name' => 'John',
    '@second_name' => 'Hancock',
    '@user_name' => '@JohnH',
  ]
);

drupal_set_message(t('Your name is @name', ['@name' => $formatted_name]));

Answer 2

Yes, the user error you are seeing means the placeholder you are using is not recognized from t(). FormattableMarkup::placeholderFormat(), the method that does the job behind the scene, recognizes just 3 placeholder-types: @variable, %variable, and :variable. If the placeholder starts with a different character, it executes the following code, which causes the behavior you are seeing.

  default:
    // We do not trigger an error for placeholder that start with an
    // alphabetic character.
    // @todo https://www.drupal.org/node/2807743 Change to an exception
    //   and always throw regardless of the first character.
    if (!ctype_alpha($key[0])) {
      // We trigger an error as we may want to introduce new placeholders
      // in the future without breaking backward compatibility.
      trigger_error('Invalid placeholder (' . $key . ') in string: ' . $string, E_USER_ERROR);
    }
    elseif (strpos($string, $key) !== FALSE) {
      trigger_error('Invalid placeholder (' . $key . ') in string: ' . $string, E_USER_DEPRECATED);
    }
    // No replacement possible therefore we can discard the argument.
    unset($args[$key]);
    break;

The description for @variable says that the value of the variable could be:

• A string, passed through \Drupal\Component\Utility\Html::escape()
• A MarkupInterface object whose string value will not be sanitized

In your case, I would just use the following code.

use Drupal\Component\Render\FormattableMarkup;

drupal_set_message(
  $this->t(
    "@amount has been transferred to @account",
    [
      '@amount' => '¥' . $form_state->getValue('amount'),
      '@account' => new FormattableMarkup($this->accountService->formatAccountName($account), [])
    ]
  )
);