I’m working on a Rails project and I’m trying to figure out how to create a table of contents similar to what you see on Wikipedia pages. The catch is I want to do this server-side, without using any JavaScript.
My HTML structure looks something like this:
<h1>Main Topic</h1>
<h2>Subtopic</h2>
<h3>Detailed Point</h3>
<h1>Another Main Topic</h1>
I’m wondering if there’s a way to automatically generate an outline or table of contents at the beginning of the page based on these headers. Has anyone done something like this before? Any tips or suggestions would be really helpful!
I’ve actually implemented something similar in one of my projects. Here’s what worked for me:
Create a custom helper method that scans your content for header tags. You can use Ruby’s built-in string methods or a more robust HTML parser like Nokogiri for this.
In your helper, build a nested array or hash structure to represent the hierarchy of your headers. Each item should include the header text and a generated anchor ID.
When rendering your content, modify your headers to include these anchor IDs.
In your view, use your helper method to generate the table of contents. You can create a partial for this and render it at the top of your page.
This approach is quite flexible and works well for dynamically generated content. It might take some tweaking to get it just right, but it’s a solid server-side solution without relying on JavaScript.
I’ve tackled this issue before in a Rails project. One effective approach is to create a custom helper method that uses Nokogiri to parse your HTML content and extract header tags along with their levels. You can then structure this data into an array of hashes representing each header. In your view, iterate over this array to render a hierarchical table of contents, linking to IDs assigned to each header. This method comprehensively addresses the requirement to generate a server-side table of contents without JavaScript.
hey there! i’ve done something similar before. you could use a gem like redcarpet to parse markdown and generate toc. it’s pretty straightforward - just configure the renderer with toc option enabled. then in your view, you can call the toc method on your parsed content. works like a charm without js!