Table of Contents Generator

About

Say you've got a README.md file with lots of information, and you want to create a table of contents with reference links

This script will help you to do so. It extracts information of titles in a given file and inserts a formatted table of contents in the position, specified by @@TOC@@ line.

Table of Contents

The table of contents for the README.md was generated with this utility, so you can treat it as a demo

• Table of Contents Generator
  • About
  • Installation
  • Usage
  • Example
  • Limitations

Installation

Easy with npm

npm install -g md-toc-filter

Usage

First, make sure you've got @@TOC@@ token on a separate line in your markdown-file. This is the place the table of contents will be inserted to.

Then, preprocess the file:

md-toc-filter README.md > NEW_README.md

You can also specify the maximal heading depth to be included in the TOC by passing the -d argument:

md-toc-filter -d 2 README.md > NEW_README.md

This will include headings up to depth 2 (##).

Pass the -a argument to use an alternative link generation mode, e.g. convert the heading "3.1.1. Foo" to "3-1-1-foo" instead of "311-foo". This argument will also strip all the non-Latin and non-numeric characters. This is useful for some Markdown renderers like the GitLab Markdown renderer.

Example

# Foo Great Project

Hey, this is my project

## Contents
@@TOC@@

## About

Some info about it

## Authors

My picture here

Will be transformed to

# Foo Great Project

Hey, this is my project

## Contents
- [Foo Great Project](#foo-great-project)
    - [Contents](#contents)
    - [About](#about)
    - [Authors](#authors)

## About

Some info about it

## Authors

My picture here

After the preprocessing you're free to modify the result as you wish. For example, it makes sense to remove reference to table of contents from table of contents

Limitations

The script doesn't support underlined titles like this

My Title
========

Use sharps instead

# My Title