Table of Contents jQuery Plugin - jquery.toc

A minimal, tiny jQuery plugin that will generate a table of contents, drawing from headings on the page.

The generated TOCs are semantic, nested lists (ul or ol) with hash-link anchors to the headings.

Usage

You can download the latest release, or install with Twitter's Bower: bower install jquery.toc.

Include jQuery (>= 1.6) and jquery.toc.js/jquery.toc.min.js on your page. The plugin can then be used either via HTML5 data attributes, or via the programmatic API. See below for the available options.

Via data attributes

Minimal example:

<ul data-toc></ul>

With options:

<ol data-toc="div.container" data-toc-headings="h2,h3,h4"></ol>

Via the JavaScript programmatic API

Minimal example:

<ul id="toc"></ul>
...
<script type="text/javascript">
    $("#toc").toc();
</script>

With options:

<ul id="toc"></ul>
...
<script type="text/javascript">
    $("#toc").toc({content: "div.container", headings: "h2,h3,h4"});
</script>

Options

<ul data-toc="content" data-toc-headings="headings"></ul>

$(...).toc({content: "body", headings: "h1,h2,h3"});

The plugin has two options:

content is a selector where the plugin will look for headings to build up the TOC. The default value is "body".
headings is a string with a comma-separated list of selectors to be used as headings, in the order which defines their relative hierarchy level. The default value of "h1,h2,h3" will select all h1, h2, and h3 elements to build the TOC, with h1 being a level 1, h2 a level 2, and so on. You can use any valid list of jQuery selectors; for example, if you just want h1 tags with a specific class, and no h3 tags, you could use "h1.title,h2" for this parameter.

In addition, the plugin will create nested lists of the same type (ul or ol) as the element that it is called on.

Automatic ID generation

The plugin generates hash-links to the headings on the page, to allow users to jump to the heading by clicking in the generated table of contents. This feature requires that the headings have IDs assigned; if they do not, the plugin will generate and assign IDs automatically.

The generated IDs are based on the text inside the headings, and uses two simple rules:

The ID must begin with a letter; so any non-letter ([^A-Za-z]) characters are discarded from the beginning of the string.
For the rest of the ID, only letters and numbers are used from the heading text; all other characters ([^A-Za-z0-9]) are converted to underscores.

For example, a heading like <h2>Heading 2.1</h2> will get the ID Heading_2_1.

Alternatives

If you're looking for a jQuery plugin that does more than just generate a minimal table of contents, the project wiki lists some more plugins.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, version 2.0.

Credits

Created by Nikhil Dabas.

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