The right way to get formatted node's body field in Drupal 7

Question

I am wondering am I doing the right "Drupal" way in getting formatted value of node's body field. Here is my code:

$field = field_get_items('node', $node, 'body');
$body = '';
if (isset($field[0]['value'])) {
  $body = check_markup($field[0]['value'], $field[0]['format']);
}

Answer 1

The API has the field_view_value() function which essentially does the same thing as your code, except it applies all of the field/instance settings to the value so you won't need to make changes to your code if you change a field setting.

You can use it like this:

$field = field_get_items('node', $node, 'body');

$body = '';
if (isset($field[0]['value'])) {
  $body = field_view_value('node', $node, 'body', $field[0]);
}

Just in case you want the default HTML wrappers included with the field output, you can use field_view_field() instead.