HeaderId¶

Summary¶

The HeaderId extension automatically generates id attributes for the header elements (h1-h6) in the resulting HTML document.

This extension is included in the standard Markdown library.

Syntax¶

By default, all headers will automatically have unique id attributes generated based upon the text of the header (see below to turn this off). Note this example, in which all three headers would have the same id:

#Header
#Header
#Header

Results in:

<h1 id="header">Header</h1>
<h1 id="header_1">Header</h1>
<h1 id="header_2">Header</h1>

Usage¶

See Extensions for general extension usage, specify headerid as the name of the extension.

See the Library Reference for information about configuring extensions.

The following options are provided to configure the output:

• level: Base level for headers.

  Default: 1

  The level setting allows you to automatically adjust the header levels to fit within the hierarchy of your html templates. For example, suppose the markdown text for a page should not contain any headers higher than level 3 (<h3>). The following will accomplish that:

  >>>  text = '''
  ... #Some Header
  ... ## Next Level'''
  >>> html = markdown.markdown(text, extensions=['headerid(level=3)'])
  >>> print html
  <h3 id="some_header">Some Header</h3>
  <h4 id="next_level">Next Level</h4>'
  

• forceid: Force all headers to have an id.

  Default: True

  The forceid setting turns on or off the automatically generated ids for headers that do not have one explicitly defined (using the Attribute List extension).

  >>> text = '''
  ... # Some Header
  ... # Header with ID # { #foo }'''
  >>> html = markdown.markdown(text, 
                  extensions=['attr_list', 'headerid(forceid=False)'])
  >>> print html
  <h1>Some Header</h1>
  <h1 id="foo">Header with ID</h1>
  

• separator: Word separator. Character which replaces whitespace in id.

  Default: -

• slugify: Callable to generate anchors.

  Default: markdown.extensions.headerid.slugify

  If you would like to use a different algorithm to define the ids, you can pass in a callable which takes two arguments:

  • value: The string to slugify.
  • separator: The Word Separator.

Using with Meta-Data¶

The HeaderId extension also supports the Meta-Data extension. Please see the documentation for that extension for specifics. The supported meta-data keywords are:

• header_level
• header_forceid

When used, the meta-data will override the settings provided through the
extension_configs interface.

This document:

header_level: 2
header_forceid: Off

# A Header

Will result in the following output:

<h2>A Header</h2>