The WordPress functions the_content and get_the_content are used to pull the main text area from the page or post

The difference between them is in the way they are used. the_content() echoes WordPress editor’s content and it’s used inside the template files while get_the_content() is fetching it to be used in the PHP code as a variable.

Please note that there is also the_content filter which is used to apply styling and shortcodes by running a chain of filters like wp_autop which adds the tags. The full list of running filters trough the_content filter are wptexturize, convert_smilies, convert_chars, shortcode_unautop, and maybe one of the most used ones do_shortcode.

Now we can dig deeper into the functions

get_the_content pulls the copy directly from the database as a raw string containing the unwrapped shortcodes. In order to make that useful, you will need to pass the data through the_content filter which will give you an appropriate HTML output.

$content = apply_filters( ‘the_content’, get_the_content() );

And last but definitely not least is the_content. This function will echo the properly formatted content directly into your template. In its essence the_content calls get_the_content and applies the_content filter before echoing the result.

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get_the_content() or the_content() in WordPress