Help with Create TOC from XPath

[mjcatt]

I'm not great with XPath, but I usually manage to stumble my way for what I need. However, I'm out of my league on this one and I'm hoping someone experienced can help.

I have a number of books that use the 'title' attribute in headers to specify the text that should be used in generating the TOC. Here's an example:

<h2 title='Text to place in TOC'>Text that goes into book itself</h2>

What XPath expression should be used in 'Create TOC from XPath' to return the value of the title attribute (i.e., 'Text to place in TOC')?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[theducks]

Originally Posted by mjcatt

I'm not great with XPath, but I usually manage to stumble my way for what I need. However, I'm out of my league on this one and I'm hoping someone experienced can help.

I have a number of books that use the 'title' attribute in headers to specify the text that should be used in generating the TOC. Here's an example:

<h2 title='Text to place in TOC'>Text that goes into book itself</h2>

What XPath expression should be used in 'Create TOC from XPath' to return the value of the title attribute (i.e., 'Text to place in TOC')?

Thanks in advance for your help!

use the default From Headers. The Title attribute prevails when ther

[mjcatt]

Originally Posted by theducks

use the default From Headers. The Title attribute prevails when ther

If I use 'Generate TOC from all headers' it picks up the text between <h1></h1>, not the text in the title attribute. So for my example, what ends up going into the TOC is 'Text that goes into book itself'.

What I have noticed is that it will use the title attribute text only if there is no text between <h1></h1>. For example:

<h1 title='Attribute Text'></h1> puts 'Attribute Text' in the TOC, but:

<h1>title='Attribute text'>Book Text</h1> puts 'Book Text' into the TOC.

I wonder if I have a setting wrong somewhere...

[theducks]

Originally Posted by mjcatt

If I use 'Generate TOC from all headers' it picks up the text between <h1></h1>, not the text in the title attribute. So for my example, what ends up going into the TOC is 'Text that goes into book itself'.

What I have noticed is that it will use the title attribute text only if there is no text between <h1></h1>. For example:

<h1 title='Attribute Text'></h1> puts 'Attribute Text' in the TOC, but:

<h1>title='Attribute text'>Book Text</h1> puts 'Book Text' into the TOC.

I wonder if I have a setting wrong somewhere...

It may be those Single Quotes, because I have generated a title="chapter # and name" many times. I did this with Sigil

[mjcatt]

Originally Posted by theducks

It may be those Single Quotes, because I have generated a title="chapter # and name" many times. I did this with Sigil

My bad. I just checked one of the example books again and it does use double quotes, not single quotes as I mistakenly wrote in my post. It turns out that it doesn't matter if they are single or double quotes - I get the same generated TOC either way.

I continue to look for any settings that would affect the TOC generator but don't see any. In editor preferences I did a 'restore all defaults' just to be sure - no changes.

[kovidgoyal]

It always uses the text in the tag in preference to the title or any other attribute. You can try using

//h:h2/@title

however I dont recall if it works with XPath that returns attributes insetead of tags.

[mjcatt]

Thanks Kovid. I had tried that earlier but no items were returned. I am continuing to dabble further with xpath. If all else fails I can resort to (inelegant) brute force HTML changes to the book via somewhat involved search/replace expressions in the editor.

[kovidgoyal]

Nothing super involved, just replace <h2(.+?)>.+< with <h2\1><

then generate the toc, copy it out and revert the changes and paste the toc back.

[mjcatt]

Yes, something like that will work and will be the simplest approach. Thanks.