jekyll-target-blank | Automatically opens external links in a new browser | Plugin library

this code looks very familiar :) I suggest you look into the Rspecs test file to test against your issues: https://github.com/keithmifsud/jekyll-target-blank

I'll try to answer your questions, sorry I couldn't test these myself the time of writing.

How to only search for a post title in the main content copy text of the post, and not the meta tags before the post or the table of contents (which is also generated before main post copy text)? I can't get this to work with Nokigiri, even though that seems to be the tool of choice here.

Your requirements here are:

1) Ignore content outside the tags.

This seems to already be implemented in the process_html() method. This method is stating the only process the body_content and it should work as it is. Have you got tests for it? How are you debugging it? The same string splitting works in my plugin. I.e. only content inside the body is processed.

2) Ignore content inside the Table of Contents (TOC). I suggest you extend the process_html() method by further splitting the body_content variable. Search for content in between the opening and closing tags of your TOC (by id, css class etc..) and exclude it, then add it back in it's position before or after process_words string.

3) Whether to use the Nokigiri plugin? This plugin is great for parsing html. I think you are parsing strings and then creating html. So vanilla Ruby and the URI plugin should suffice. You can still use it if you want but it won't be any faster then splitting strings in ruby.

If a post's URL is not at post.data['url'], where is it?

I think you should a have method to get all all post titles and then match the "words" against the array. You can get all the posts collection from the doc itself doc.site.posts and foreach post return the title. The the process_words() method can check each work to see if it matched an item from the array. But what if the title is made of more than one word?

Also, is there a more efficient, cleaner way to do this?

So far so good. I'll start with getting the issues fixed and then refactor for speed and coding standards.

Again I suggest you use testing to help you with this.

Let me know if I can help more :)