Text higlighting is part of DynaCloud – where tags/keywords are automatically highlighted once they’re clicked – so I took that code and made it a stand-alone JavaScript text highlighting jQuery plugin.

Demo

Each of the links will highlight the corresponding word.

• highlight
• javascript

Remove highlights again.

Usage

Add highlight

Download jquery.highlight-3.js (2 KB) and add it to your page after jQuery. A YUI compressed version (1 KB) is also available.

Style the highlight class

Create an entry in your style sheet for the highlight class.

.highlight { background-color: yellow }

Highlight terms

Call the highlight function with the text to highlight. To highlight all occurrances of “bla” (case insensitive) in all li elements, use the following code:

$('li').highlight('bla');

Remove highlighting

The highlight can be removed from any element with the removeHighlight function. In this example, all highlights under the element with the ID highlight-plugin are removed.

$('#highlight-plugin').removeHighlight();

Changelog

• 2009-02-22: Bugfix for one or two strange problems with IE. Also made API easier to use.
• 2008-06-04: Bugfix for incorrect DOM normalization. Thanks Georgy.
• 2007-09-15: Initial release.