Auto named-anchors in markdown

Question

I am using Markdown in PHP and have written a regex to automatically wrap the text inside if any `

-

` tag with a named-anchor (`Text`) for linking. Here is the PHP: ``` $text = '
This is a

Test

to see if this works

'; $regex = '/\(.+)\<\/h[0-6]{1}\>/'; echo preg_replace($regex, '$2', $text); ``` And the result is: ```

This is a

Test

to see if this works

``` The important thing here is, Markdown is light-weight and easy on storage space. Manually adding in the named-anchors kind of defeats the purpose of using Markdown altogether. This method works fine for testing purposes, but I would like to know (and here is the question) if there is a better, more language-agnostic, way to accomplish this. NOTE: The client this is for, wants it this way because they feel even the native Markdown syntax may alienate their more "computer-illiterate" users: `# [Text](#T…

Accepted Answer

Seeing as you're already using PHP, you should really take a look at the Markdown Extra implementation. From the MDE docs:

With PHP Markdown Extra, you can set id attribute to headers. You should add the id prefixed by a hash inside curly brackets after the header at the end of the line, like this:

```
Header 1            {#header1}
========

## Header 2 ##      {#header2}
```

Then you can create links to different parts of the same document like this:

```
[Link back to header 1](#header1)
```

Auto named-anchors in markdown

Solution

Problem