Table Field Add-on for ACF and SCF

To render the table fields data as an html table in one of your template files (page.php, single.php) you can start with the following basic code example:

$table = get_field( 'your_table_field_name' );

if ( ! empty ( $table ) ) {

echo '<table>';

if ( ! empty( $table['caption'] ) ) {

echo '<caption>' . $table['caption'] . '</caption>'; }

if ( ! empty( $table['header'] ) ) {

echo '<thead>';

echo '<tr>';

If the table has only one empty cell, then get_field() returns FALSE. get_field() returns NULL when a field is not stored in the database. That happens when a page is copied but not their fields content. You can check both with empty()…

$table = get_field( 'your_table_field_name' );

if ( ! empty( $table ) ) { // $table is not FALSE and not NULL. // Field exists in database and has content. }

This is about displaying line breaks in the admin tables and getting line breaks as <br> when outputting the tables HTML.

Converting Line Breaks for HTML Output

To convert line breaks to <br> in tables HTML output the PHP function nl2br() can be used:

For line breaks in table header cells replace…

echo $th['c'];

with…

echo nl2br( $th['c'] );

For line breaks in table body cells replace…

echo $td['c'];

with…

In general, its up to the page builder plugins to support ACF field types. But because the table field is not a native ACF field, the support for this field may never happen in page builders.

For now the way to go is using a shortcode. Elementor provides for example a shortcode widget. Before you can use a shortcode to display a table fields table, you have to setup a shortcode in functions.php.

You can use the ACF PHP function update_field() to change a tables data.

Notice

• Make sure that the number of entries in the header array matches the number of cells in the body rows.
• The array key ‘c’ stands for the content of the cells to have the option of adding other cell setting in future development.

Since version 1.3.1 of the table plugin, the storing format of the table data changes from JSON string to serialized array for new or updated tables. The issue with JSON is because of third party plugins that do not properly applying wp_slash() to a post_meta value before updating with update_post_metadata(). This can break JSON strings because update_post_metadata() removes backslashes by default.