Table of Contents

[jbenet]

Would be nice to generate a table of contents from a markdown file, like http://pythonhosted.org/Markdown/extensions/toc.html

something like:

> cat foo.md
#1
## 1 1
### 1 1 1
## 1 2
## 1 3
### 1 3 1

> marked --toc foo.md
<ul>
  <li><a href="#1">1</a>
    <ul>
      <li><a href="#1-1">1 1</a>
        <ul>
          <li><a href="#1-1-1">1 1 1</a></li>
        <ul>
      </li>
      <li><a href="#1-2">1 2</a></li>
      <li><a href="#1-3">1 3</a>
        <ul>
          <li><a href="#1-3-1">1 3 1</a></li>
        <ul>
      <li>
    </ul>
  </li>
</ul>

[killercup]

I'm currently writing something like that for a project using a custom renderer that automatically populates an array of headlines (cf. Readme).

[SimonCropp]

@killercup can u share some more specific code?

[killercup]

Sure.

var marked = require('marked');
var renderer = new marked.Renderer();
var toc = []; // your table of contents as a list.

renderer.heading = function(text, level) {
  var slug = text.toLowerCase().replace(/[^\w]+/g, '-');
  toc.push({
    level: level,
    slug: slug,
    title: text
  });
  return "<h" + level + " id=\"" + slug + "\"><a href=\"#" + slug + "\" class=\"anchor\"></a>" + text + "</h" + level + ">";
};

var convertMarkdown = function(text) {
  return marked(text, {
    renderer: renderer
  });
};

For a complete implementation see here. This populates the toc array with headline objects. If you want to transform this flat list into a tree, you could use a function like the one found here called tocToTree.

[SimonCropp]

@killercup you rock

[jonschlinkert]

try this: https://github.com/jonschlinkert/marked-toc.

[alanhogan]

Note that some Markdown implementations/variants support this. Python-markdown comes to mind:
https://pythonhosted.org/Markdown/extensions/toc.html

However, it’s not common or standardized (sadly, there is basically no such thing as a Markdown standard).
Here’s a bunch of implementations ignoring [TOC] on Babelmark 2

(also… +1)

[joshbruce]

Not sure this is in keeping with the specifications being targeted.

See #956