As a mere example, I want to apply the class \"fancy\" to all occurrences of the sign \"&\" in the document.
The C
This isn't something that jQuery is generally helpful with--it works more at the node level than the text/html level. However, this might help (source):
$('p:contains(&)').each(function(){
$(this).html(
$(this).html().replace('&','&')
);
});
Obviously if you can restrict the initial search to something better than all paragraphs, it'd perform better. You should also test it to see if the :contains filter actually helps.
It's not pretty but it seems to work.