Hooking into comment_text() to add surrounding tag

Question

Trying to hook into the function comment_text() supplied by Wordpress API to wrap the output of every comment into a <div>...</div> container I am running into the following problem:

Without my added filter the output of comment_text() looks like this:

<p>Hello User!</p>
<p>Thank you for your comment.</p>
<p>Stefan</p>

Thats fine but as I said I would like to have it wrapped into a <div class="comment-text">...</div>. As far as I know the correct way doing this would be in adding a filter to functions.php of my theme and so I did:

function stefan_wrap_comment_text($content) {
    return "<div class=\"comment-text\">". $content ."</div>";
}
add_filter('comment_text', 'stefan_wrap_comment_text');

As I can see from the output the given filter works but it has a negative sideeffect to the first paragraph of the content as you can see in the following example. The first paragraph should be <p>Hello User!</p> but looks like this: Hello User!.

<div class="comment-text">
    Hello User!
    <p>Thank you for your comment.</p>
    <p>Stefan</p>
</div>

Any ideas or hints what I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

Try to lower the priority of your function, maybe there is some formatting function which you precede.

add_filter('comment_text', 'stefan_wrap_comment_text', 1000);

Answer 2

Ouch, just stumbled over the file wp-includes/default-filters.php and found out that there are several filters applied to the same function per default:

add_filter( 'comment_text', 'wptexturize'            );
add_filter( 'comment_text', 'convert_chars'          );
add_filter( 'comment_text', 'make_clickable',      9 );
add_filter( 'comment_text', 'force_balance_tags', 25 ); 
add_filter( 'comment_text', 'convert_smilies',    20 );
add_filter( 'comment_text', 'wpautop',            30 );

The last filter with priority 30 calls the function wpautop() that is used for replacing double line breaks with <p>...</p>. Per default add_filter() registers new filters on priority 10. Changing my filter to be the last by choosing a higher number everything works fine.

// This doesn't work because default priority is 10:
// add_filter('comment_text', 'stefan_wrap_comment_text');
// Add a lower priority (higher number) to apply this filter at last: 
add_filter('comment_text', 'stefan_wrap_comment_text', 99);