hide an entry from Toc in latex

Question

I would like to know how I can hide a section from the table of contents but without loosing the section number in the body of the document. For example, in this tex

Answer 1

I think you are looking for

\section*{hide}
\addtocounter{section}{1}

or make it into a command:

\newcommand{\toclesssection}[1]{\section*{#1}\addtocounter{section}{1}}

EDIT:

Okay, I think I understand what is wanted now (and it makes more sense then the answer I gave). Here is a command that you can use to suppress adding a section, subsection, etc. to the TOC. The idea is to temporarily disable \addcontentsline.

\newcommand{\nocontentsline}[3]{}
\newcommand{\tocless}[2]{\bgroup\let\addcontentsline=\nocontentsline#1{#2}\egroup}
...
\tocless\section{hide}
\tocless\subsection{subhide}

Answer 2

Just wanted to say thanks for Ivans great hint! (I was just googling for something similar for my customized (Sub)Appendix{} commands:

\newcommand{\nocontentsline}[3]{}
\newcommand{\tocless}[2]{\bgroup\let\addcontentsline=\nocontentsline#1{#2}\egroup}

\newcommand{\Appendix}[1]{
  \refstepcounter{section}
  \section*{Appendix \thesection:\hspace*{1.5ex} #1}
  \addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Appendix \thesection}
}
\newcommand{\SubAppendix}[1]{\tocless\subsection{#1}}

Maybe this is useful for someone else, too...)

Answer 3

have just come here from a similar question. The answer above didn't quite work as it gave some formatting issues, but a similar solution seemed to do the trick