Allow flag for natural table of content anchor texts

[matsko]

I'm in the process of switching my blog over to Hugo from Jekyll and one of features that my current website has is my own, custom table of contents. But now since I'm using Hugo, I can simply use the {{ .TableOfContents }} markdown template function. It works great, but I feel that the generated "#toc_X" anchor tags are not good for SEO (especially for articles that had different tags from before).

What would be really nice is to have the anchor URLs be generated as a lowercase, hyphenated version of the title text. Something like:

# Welcome to my new blog article
--> website.com/posts/page#welcome-to-my-new-blog-article

[natefinch]

That seems pretty reasonable. I'm not that familiar with that part of the code, but it sounds not too difficult, and worthwhile (no one like ugly anchor text)

[spf13]

This takes place in the Black Friday library. That leaves us two options.

1. Patch upstream.
2. Parse and replace the upstream output

[matsko]

We should fix it at the source. I'll post an issue on blackfriday.

[matsko]

I do see a toc_0 inside of https://github.com/spf13/hugo/blob/master/hugolib/page.go#L717 but I'm guessing that is some code to detect the generated set of links.

Could we possibly patch this for now? I haven't gotten any proper updates in the issue I posted on blackfriday.

[matsko]

Any update on this? I really need this fix.

[spf13]

Really the only Good way to do it is upstream. Anything else would be a brittle hack that would break the moment they actually implemented it properly.

[spf13]

Good news
I've merged #454 which allows you to specify id's in markdown.

Bad news.
There's a bug in BlackFriday that ignores this for TOC and tries to use the numbered ids even though they don't exist.

I filed a ticket there about it. russross/blackfriday#112

[halostatue]

I have submitted PRs russross/blackfriday#124 and russross/blackfriday#125 to fix both of these issues with automatic header ID generation. If accepted as I’ve provided, Hugo will require a small additional change to enable the header ID generation extension.

[bep]

@halostatue what is the status of this?

[halostatue]

Those were both merged in 2014. Beyond that, I don’t know. In theory, it should work.

[bep]

Note/Update: This issue is marked as stale, and I may have said something earlier about "opening a thread on the discussion forum". Please don't.

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[github-actions]

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