Editor API

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Newer Version Available

This documentation is for Moodle 4.3.
You may also want to read the documentation for the upcoming version of Moodle.

The editor API lets you control Moodle text editors. It can be found in lib/editorlib.php.

important

Normally you do not need to use this API directly because you can include editors as part of a Moodle form, which will automatically set up the editor for you.

How to set up a text editor

To set up a text editor on an existing HTML text area field:

• Call function editors_get_preferred_editor(), which will return an object of the texteditor class.
• Call function use_editor() to enable the editor for the text area.

For example, assuming there is an HTML text area with id mytextareaid:

$editor = editors_get_preferred_editor(FORMAT_HTML);
$editor->use_editor('mytextareaid');

Editor options

The use_editor function allows an options array to be supplied.

General options

• context: set to the current context object
• enable_filemanagement: set false to disable the file management plugin
• autosave: set false to disable autosave

Atto-specific options

• toolbar: set to override which icons appear on the toolbar (normally it uses the admin setting - this is for special cases for example if you want a minimal editor in a particular plugin).

The following example will cause atto to show the four buttons indicated.

$attobuttons = 'style1 = bold, italic' .  PHP_EOL . 'list = unorderedlist, orderedlist';
$editor->use_editor($id, [
    'context' => $context,
    'autosave' => false,
    'atto:toolbar' => $attobuttons
], [
    'return_types' => FILE_EXTERNAL,
]);