I am looking for a good way to highlight key words in a block of html with stripping
the html tags. I can regex to search for key words within html tags, but I haven't found a
great way to search across tags. For example, if
the key word phrase is "not bound" I want to be able to make this
<p>I am not<strong>bound to please thee</strong> with my answers.</p>
become wrapped in highlight tags, without breaking
the "strong" tag (and making
the html invalid) and become:
<p>I am <span class="highlight">not</span><strong><span class="highlight">bound</span> to please thee</strong> with my answers.</p>
The main issue is maintaining
the html as it is AND wrapping blocks of text with highlight tags. I need to maintain
the original html. Otherwise I would strip
the tags.
The best solution to this that I can think of right now would entail making a copy of
the html and placing counter tokens where each space occurs, then stripping all tags and search for matching phrases, then looking back to
the original and
the tokenized strings and figuring out where to start building
the highlight tags, then start walking forward, starting and ending highlight spans as needed from
the beginning of
the match until
the end. This seems like overkill. I would like to something more elegant if possible.
The solution would be written in C# or perhaps javascript, depending.
