Why would the below eliminate the whitespace around matched keyword text when replacing it with an anchor link? Note, this error only occurs in Chrome, and not firefox.

For complete context, the file is located at: http://seox.org/lbp/lb-core.js

To view the code in action (no errors found yet), the demo page is at http://seox.org/test.html. Copy/Pasting the first paragraph into a rich text editor (ie: dreamweaver, or gmail with rich text editor turned on) will reveal the problem, with words bunched together. Pasting it into a plain text editor will not.

// Find page text (not in links) -> doxdesk.com
function findPlainTextExceptInLinks(element, substring, callback) {
    for (var childi= element.childNodes.length; childi-->0;) {
        var child= element.childNodes[childi];
        if (child.nodeType===1) {
            if (child.tagName.toLowerCase()!=='a')
                findPlainTextExceptInLinks(child, substring, callback);
        } else if (child.nodeType===3) {
            var index= child.data.length;
            while (true) {
                index= child.data.lastIndexOf(substring, index);
                if (index===-1 || limit.indexOf(substring.toLowerCase()) !== -1)
                    break;
                // don't match an alphanumeric char
                var dontMatch =/\w/;
                if(child.nodeValue.charAt(index - 1).match(dontMatch) || child.nodeValue.charAt(index+keyword.length).match(dontMatch))
                    break;
                // alert(child.nodeValue.charAt(index+keyword.length + 1));
                callback.call(window, child, index)
            }
        }
    }
}

// Linkup function, call with various type cases (below)
function linkup(node, index) {

    node.splitText(index+keyword.length);
    var a= document.createElement('a');
    a.href= linkUrl;
    a.appendChild(node.splitText(index));
    node.parentNode.insertBefore(a, node.nextSibling);
    limit.push(keyword.toLowerCase()); // Add the keyword to memory
    urlMemory.push(linkUrl); // Add the url to memory
}

// lower case (already applied)
findPlainTextExceptInLinks(lbp.vrs.holder, keyword, linkup);

Thanks in advance for your help. I'm nearly ready to launch the script, and will gladly comment in kudos to you for your assistance.