highlight words in html using regex & javascript – almost there

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Just use jQuerys built-in text() method. It will return all the characters in a selected DOM element.

For the DOM approach (docs for the Node interface): Run over all child nodes of an element. If the child is an element node, run recursively. If it’s a text node, search in the text (node.data) and if you want to highlight/change something, shorten the text of the node until the found position, and insert a highligth-span with the matched text and another text node for the rest of the text.

Example code (adjusted, origin is here):

(function iterate_node(node) {
    if (node.nodeType === 3) { // Node.TEXT_NODE
        var text = node.data,
            pos = text.search(/any regular expression/g), //indexOf also applicable
            length = 5; // or whatever you found
        if (pos > -1) {
            node.data = text.substr(0, pos); // split into a part before...
            var rest = document.createTextNode(text.substr(pos+length)); // a part after
            var highlight = document.createElement("span"); // and a part between
            highlight.className = "highlight";
            highlight.appendChild(document.createTextNode(text.substr(pos, length)));
            node.parentNode.insertBefore(rest, node.nextSibling); // insert after
            node.parentNode.insertBefore(highlight, node.nextSibling);
            iterate_node(rest); // maybe there are more matches
        }
    } else if (node.nodeType === 1) { // Node.ELEMENT_NODE
        for (var i = 0; i < node.childNodes.length; i++) {
            iterate_node(node.childNodes[i]); // run recursive on DOM
        }
    }
})(content); // any dom node

There’s also highlight.js, which might be exactly what you want.

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