In today’s addition of “really simple things that come in handy all the time” I present a simple script to extract the table of contents from markdown or asciidoc files:
So this is pretty simple, just use regular expressions to look for lines that start with one or more "#" or "=" (for markdown and asciidoc, respectively) and print them out with an indent according to their depth (e.g. indent ## heading 2 one block). Because this script goes from top to bottom, you get a quick view of the document structure without creating a nested data structure under the hood. I’ve also implemented some simple type detection using common extensions to decide which regex to use.
The result is a quick view of the structure of a markup file, especially when they can get overly large. From the Markdown of one of my longer blog posts :
- A Practical Guide to Anonymizing Datasets with python - Anonymizing CSV Data - Generating Fake Data - Creating A Provider - Maintaining Data Quality - Domain Distribution - Realistic Profiles - Fuzzing Fake Names from Duplicates - Conclusion - Acknowledgments - FootnotesAnd from the first chapter of Applied Text Analysis with Python :
- Language and Computation - - - What is Language? - Identifying the Basic Units of Language - Formal vs. Natural Languages - Formal Languages - Natural Languages - Language Models - Language Features - Contextual Features - Structural Features - The Academic State of the Art - Tools for Natural Language Processing - Language Aware Data Products - ConclusionOk, so clearly there are some bugs, those two blank - bullet points are a note callout which has the form:
[NOTE] ==== Insert note text here. ====Therefore misidentifying the first and second ==== as a level 4 heading. I tried a couple of regular expression fixes for this, but couldn’t exactly get it. The next step is to add a simple loop to do multiple paths so that I can print out the table of contents for an entire directory (e.g. to get the TOC for the entire book where one chapter == one file).