HTML API: Prevent remove_attribute() from introducing a self-closing flag

[sirreal]

Problem

Inside a tag, a / is ignored unless it's immediately followed by >, in which case it's the self-closing flag. When an attribute is directly preceded by a /, removing just the attribute's own span can leave that / adjacent to the >, introducing a self-closing flag that wasn't in the input:

$p = new WP_HTML_Tag_Processor( '<svg><g /attr>ok' );
$p->next_tag( 'G' );
$p->remove_attribute( 'attr' );
echo $p->get_updated_html();
// Before: <svg><g />ok   ← `g` is now self-closing; "ok" is no longer its child
// After:  <svg><g >ok

Other affected shapes: <g/attr> → <g/>, <g a/b> (remove b) → <g a/>, <g a="x"/b> (remove b) → <g a="x"/>, and duplicated attributes like <g /a /a> → <g / />.

Fix

Attribute removals now also consume any / characters immediately preceding the attribute. This is safe because a / can only appear directly before an attribute as a separator: tag names and attribute names terminate at /, and inside an unquoted value / is part of the value rather than preceding an attribute.

Two consequences of consuming the slashes are handled:

• Separator preservation. Only a quoted value can be directly followed by another attribute, e.g. <g/a="x"b>. Removing /a="x" outright would merge the tag name with the following attribute (<gb>); <g c/a="x"b> would become <g cb>. When the consumed slashes were the only separator and an attribute immediately follows, a single space takes their place: <g b>, <g c b>.
• Update ordering. When the removed attribute directly follows the tag name (<g/a>), the removal now starts at the same offset where set_attribute() inserts new attributes. Lexical updates were ordered by start then by text, which placed the removal (empty text) before the insertion and corrupted the output (<g> b="x"/a>). Zero-length insertions now sort before consuming replacements at the same offset.

The same logic applies when removing duplicated attributes.

Whitespace between a / and the attribute is intentionally left alone (<g / attr> → <g / >), since / > is not a self-closing flag.

Testing

• test_remove_attribute_preserves_tag_semantics: data provider of slash/quote/equals shapes; asserts exact output, then re-parses and checks the tag name, self-closing flag, remaining attribute set, and following text are unchanged.
• test_set_and_remove_attribute_at_tag_name_end: combinations of set_attribute()/add_class() and remove_attribute() where the removal reaches the tag-name end.

Beyond the unit tests, a combinatorial fuzzer over malformed tag shapes (separators ' ', /, //, / , ''…; attribute shapes a, a=b, a="b", a=/, a=b/, =, =a, a ="b"…; closers >, />, / >, //>…; up to three attributes; duplicates) applied remove_attribute, set_attribute, add_class, remove_class and combinations, then re-parsed the output and diffed the token stream against the expected change. Before this PR: ~83k of 1.6M checks diverged. After: 0 of 2.3M, excluding one unrelated pre-existing class noted below.

Out of scope

The fuzzer also surfaced a pre-existing set_attribute( $name, true ) issue: a bare boolean name emitted directly before whitespace followed by = merges with it. E.g. <x => + set_attribute( 'b', true ) → <x b =>, which parses as b="" and drops the = attribute. That's independent of removal and not addressed here.

Trac ticket:

None.

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🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[github-actions]

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