Extension:Auto-Anchor

Introduction
One thing about wiki headers is that, with the following:

MediaWiki is smart enough to strip out all the markup and hyper-linking from the text to create an anchor with the name "Header_Text_More_Text." However, it's been found that sometimes this mechanism is desired outside the headers, because, although, it does a great job making destination anchors, one doesn't necessarily want every destination anchor showing up in the TOC. And though you can manually create the destination anchor like so:

Some of us are just plain lazy. This is where this simple little extension comes into play.

Usage
Where  is 0 or any positive integer. It specifies the number of wiki-headers that already have "wikitext". This is needed because there no way for the extension to know what IDs are already in use. (See 7356.)

Examples
gives Runnin' Down A Dream where the ID of the surrounding span tag is. So if I want to link to that section I can just copy the text and paste into a wiki-syntax link:

Link! Damn you!

yields Link! Damn you!.

Specifying  as "4"

gives the id as  without changing the displayed text.

Don't Templates Like Anchor Already Do This?
The Anchor template doesn't strip out any markup. So if a template named Template:Anchor were used whose content is



using the above example like so

would give the id as.

Known Issues

 * No guarantee of ID uniqueness.
 * Does not ensure the first character of the ID is a letter. Blocked by 4515.
 * Newlines as part of the input may result in overlapping HTML tags blocks.

Download instructions
Please cut and paste the code found below and place it in  and. Note: stands for the root directory of your MediaWiki installation, the same directory that holds .

Installation
To install this extension, add the following to :