How to highlight text using javascript

Question

Can someone help me with a javascript function that can highlight text on a web page. And the requirement is to - highlight only once, not like highlight all occurrences of

Answer 1

I have the same problem, a bunch of text comes in through a xmlhttp request. This text is html formatted. I need to highlight every occurrence.

str=''
    +'
some text containing fox.
'

The problem is that I don't need to highlight text in tags. For example I need to highlight fox:

Now I can replace it with:

var word="fox";
word="(\\b"+ 
    word.replace(/([{}()[\]\\.?*+^$|=!:~-])/g, "\\$1")
        + "\\b)";
var r = new RegExp(word,"igm");
str.replace(r,"$1")

To answer your question: you can leave out the g in regexp options and only first occurrence will be replaced but this is still the one in the img src property and destroys the image tag:

'
    +'
some text containing fox.
'
var word="fox";
word="(\\b"+ 
    word.replace(/([{}()[\]\\.?*+^$|=!:~-])/g, "\\$1")
    + "\\b)";
var r = new RegExp(word,"igm");
str.replace(/(>[^<]+<)/igm,function(a){
    return a.replace(r,"$1");
});