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 :r

Answer 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:

Titles are targets, too

Implict references, like Titles are targets, too.