How to change the location of the TOC in a MediaWiki skin - mediawiki

Question

I'm woking on a MediaWiki skin for my site. For the page content I'm using <?= $this->html( 'bodycontent' ); ?> to output it all. Part of this, on longer pages, is the Table of Contents (TOC).
I would like to move the location of the TOC out of the body an into the sidebar but I'm not sure how to prevent the TOC from showing in the bodycontent or where to get the raw data to display it in the sidebar.
I'm hoping there is a data time similar to $this->data['sidebar']['navigation'] that I can use to format it how I want.
How can I turn off the TOC in the bodycontent?
Is there a $this->data location that has the TOC data?

Answer 1

The MediaWiki skinning system is not really designed for this, but someone created an extension to make your work easier: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DeToc
Using that extension you would do something like this (inside function execute()):
$body = $this->data['bodycontent'];
$new_body = DeToc::RemoveToc($body, $extracted_toc);
/* Print body */
echo $new_body;
/* Print TOC somewhere else */
echo $extracted_toc;
Alternatively you could just turn off the TOC, using $parser->mShowToc = false;, and then create the TOC yourself. MediaWiki internally uses a regex like this to find all sections: '/^\={2,5}(.*?)\={2,5}$/m'