Checking link anchors

support
1

Short version: what is the preferred method to create references to anchors on pages and have errors checked at compile time?

Long version:
When I link to another page (using, say, relref), Hugo checks that the page exists (nice! - although, maybe that’s just because I do a .GetPage) so I can avoid errors.

Right now, I build links to anchors by adding “#anchor” to the URL. Is there a way to check that the anchor really is on the page?

Here is what I am using (it works great, but doesn’t do error checking) - you can see where I concatenate the “#” and anchorized string:

{{- /* Mike's first attempt to make a Hugo Template
     * the first param is the page
     * the second param (optional) is the anchor
     */ -}}
{{- $pagename := .Get 0 -}}
{{- $anchorname := .Get 1 -}}
{{- $target := relref . $pagename -}}
[{{- with .Site.GetPage $pagename -}}{{- .Title -}}{{end}}{{- with $anchorname -}}   ({{- $anchorname -}}){{- end -}}]({{ $target }}{{- with $anchorname -}}#{{- anchorize $anchorname -}}{{- end -}})

This is one of those “Hugo is working great, but this could make it even cooler” things.

Thanks!

2

Not easily. Hugo won’t know what anchors exist on the target page until the target page is fully rendered. I suppose you could .GetPage and then parse the .Content for element IDs and named anchors, but this approach seems fragile and potentially expensive.

1 Like
3

Makes total sense - the process that fills in those id attributes for the anchors may not be run if the page isn’t processed yet, so this would have to be two pass.

4

A post-rendering check for anchor links would be great. It should include internal links generated by a render-link.html render hook. As long as there isn’t a built-in option for that, my recommendation is GitHub - wjdp/htmltest: Test generated HTML for problems with the CheckAnchors option enabled.