Force \addtocontents to be placed in the correct order

Question

I have something like this:

\tableofcontents*
\chapter{chap1}
\chapter{chap2}
\addtocontents{toc}{test}
\chapter{chap3}

and the ToC is produced like this

chap1
chap2
chap3
test

I was wondering how to force test to be placed in correct order (chap1, chap2, test, chap3).

Answer 1

The command \addtocontents is mainly intended to be used to enter formatting information (extra spacing, for example) not directly related to any particular actual line of contents of the ToC; if you want to introduce some text together with some information (such as the page number) and some formatting (such as the one used for a particuar sectional unit), then you might want to use \addcontentsline:

\documentclass{book}

\begin{document}

\tableofcontents
\chapter{chap1}
\chapter{chap2}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{test}
\chapter{chap3}

\end{document}

If used together with the hyperref package, a \phantomsection command should also be included to get the proper result for the hyperlinks in the table of contents and for the bookmarks.

EDIT: since you don't want the page number nor any special formatting for the text to be included, then you can use \addtocontents:

\documentclass{memoir}

\begin{document}

\tableofcontents
\chapter{chap1}
\chapter{chap2}
\addtocontents{toc}{\bigskip text\par}
\chapter{chap3}

\end{document}