[Patch] Ignore empty tags

Hi,

Sometimes an editor inadvertently creates an empty h tag – something I’ve seen countless times in the 10k+ posts on our site so far. I’ve fixed this in Hackadelic TOC, but now that we’re switching to TOC Plus, I wanted to have it fixed there too. Here’s the patch to do so – it’d be great if it could be applied to the core (adjust it for white space though, as my editor inserts spaces instead of tabs):

Index: toc.php
===================================================================
--- toc.php     (revision 802211)
+++ toc.php     (working copy)
@@ -1288,19 +1288,22 @@

                                // list item
                                if ( in_array($matches[$i][2], $this->options['heading_levels']) ) {
-                                       $html .= '<a href="#' . $this->url_anchor_target( $matches[$i][0] ) . '">';
-                                       if ( $this->options['ordered_list'] ) {
-                                               // attach leading numbers when lower in hierarchy
-                                               $html .= '<span class="toc_number toc_depth_' . ($current_depth - $numbered_items_min + 1) . '">';
-                                               for ($j = $numbered_items_min; $j < $current_depth; $j++) {
-                                                       $number = ($numbered_items[$j]) ? $numbered_items[$j] : 0;
-                                                       $html .= $number . '.';
-                                               }
-
-                                               $html .= ($numbered_items[$current_depth] + 1) . '</span> ';
-                                               $numbered_items[$current_depth]++;
-                                       }
-                                       $html .= strip_tags($matches[$i][0]) . '</a>';
+          $text = strip_tags($matches[$i][0]);
+          if (!empty($text)) {
+                                         $html .= '<a href="#' . $this->url_anchor_target( $matches[$i][0] ) . '">';
+                                         if ( $this->options['ordered_list'] ) {
+                                               // attach leading numbers when lower in hierarchy
+                                               $html .= '<span class="toc_number toc_depth_' . ($current_depth - $numbered_items_min + 1) . '">';
+                                               for ($j = $numbered_items_min; $j < $current_depth; $j++) {
+                                                       $number = ($numbered_items[$j]) ? $numbered_items[$j] : 0;
+                                                       $html .= $number . '.';
+                                               }
+
+                                               $html .= ($numbered_items[$current_depth] + 1) . '</span> ';
+                                               $numbered_items[$current_depth]++;
+                                         }
+                                         $html .= $text . '</a>';
+          }
                                }

Before this change: http://i.imgur.com/eFXYz5p.png

After the change: http://i.imgur.com/JKsLbiK.png

https://wordpress.org/plugins/table-of-contents-plus/