What I ended up with is a bit specific to my site, and I’m sure there’s a better way to go about it, but here it is if someone wants to play with it:
http://pastie.org/852611

I’m going to always use h3′s, so I removed the need for the “tag” attribute (so the shortcode is just [content_table]), and since it’s in the sidebar, I’ll never need to divide it in half, so I removed that bit too, along with some slight markup changes, etc.

The “echo” doesn´t seem to work but I´m not so much a PHP guy and not sure where exactly to put it.

Maybe something went wrong when I copy&paste the code for the functions file. Is it possible you send it to me via email in a txt file?

by

$content = str_replace($m[0], $content_table, $content);

By echo I meant using the echo function in php to print out some variable like $content_table before doing the replace. Just to double check that the function acually works.

[content_table tag="h3"]

what do you mean “echo at various stages…”?

If still no luck try to echo at various stage of the function to see where it fails.

I’ve corrected that in the article as well.

But it still does not wor properly. When I type in

[content_table tag=h3]

in order to get the h3 headings in a list the output is just the shortcode as plain text. D I make any mistake?

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING in /PATH-TO-FILE/functions.php on line 190

In line 190 is the part for the “back to top” links:

$content = preg_replace("|(.*)|e", "''.ucfirst('$1').'Back to top'", $content);

Any idea what´s happened?