How to make an internal link to a heading in sphinx restructuredtext without creating arbitrary labels?

Question

I have a document with many headings and sub-headings. Further into the text I want to link back to one of the headings. How can I do this without the redundancy of :ref: labels? The contents seems to pick up headers just fine. I was hoping for something like this: `#polled-data-retrieval`_.

Solution 1

reStructuredText supports implicit hyperlink targets. From the reStructuredText quick reference:

Section titles, footnotes, and citations automatically generate hyperlink targets (the title text or footnote/citation label is used as the hyperlink name).

So the following text (lifted from the reStructuredText quick reference, spelling mistakes and all):

Titles are targets, too
=======================
Implict references, like `Titles are targets, too`_.

produces HTML similar to the following:

<strong><a name="title">Titles are targets, too</a></strong>

<p>Implict references, like <a href="#title">Titles are targets, too</a>.</p>

Solution 2

New, better answer for 2016!

The autosection extension lets you do this easily, with real cross references.

=============
Some Document
=============


Internal Headline
=================

then, later...

===============
Some Other Doc
===============


A link-  :ref:`Internal Headline`

This extension is built-in, so all you need is to edit conf.py

extensions = [
    .
    . other
    . extensions
    . already
    . listed
    .
    'sphinx.ext.autosectionlabel',
]

The only thing you have to be careful of is that now you can't duplicate internal headlines across the doc collection. (Worth it.)

Solution 3

A small addition to the answer by Chris:

If you want to link to headings without using the exact name of that heading for the link, you can do it like this:

Titles are targets, too
=======================

See `here <#titles-are-targets-too>`_

This will render as:

<h1 id="titles-are-targets-too">Titles are targets, too</h1>

<p>See <a href="#titles-are-targets-too">here</a></p>

Solution 4

Using the headline text isn't a good choice. Headlines may change or might get corrected. There is now easy way to figure out who many and where links are broken after a change.

Using ref is advised over standard reStructuredText links to sections (like `Section title`_) because it works across files, when section headings are changed, will raise warnings if incorrect, and works for all builders that support cross-references.
Source: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/roles.html#role-ref

Using the sphinx.ext.autosectionlabel extension as proposed by Adam Michael Wood is at least a more structured approach then using implicitly defined anchors as proposed by Chris.

---

You should use explicit linking with references and symbolic target names (like LaTeX does since ages.)

1. Use .. _refname: to create a target.
2. Use :ref:`refname` to reference the target.

If a target is followed by a headline, this headline will be used als link text.

View more solutions

Comments

[Mad Physicist]

Thank you. I kept thinking this was always enabled by default, couldn't figure out why some of my refs weren't working.

[rvf]

A minor addition: :ref:`Short link <Very long headline that clutters your text otherwise>` is possible as well

[Paebbels]

Using the headline text isn't a good choice. Headlines may change or might get corrected. There is now easy way to figure out who many and where links are broken after a change. You should use explicit linking with references (like LaTeX does since ages.)

[Cecil Curry]

This is the most general-purpose answer. Most answers assume Sphinx, which is certainly fair enough for a question referencing Sphinx. Since Sphinx fails to apply to generic reStructuredText documents (e.g., README.rst in GitHub or GitLab repositories), however, answers assuming Sphinx-specific :ref: syntax fail to generalize. See also this authoritative answer elsewhere.

[The Godfather]

Reading the first part of the answer I'm thinking "yeah, makes sense" but... when are the examples, how should one actually use it?

[Peilonrayz]

@CecilCurry Unless you need the output to work in something that isn't a browser.

[TheClem]

This option worked for me, thank you! However, it is not compatible with sphinx_togglebutton extension. Do you have any suggestion on it or should I compose a new question about it?