I want to "extract" a text from within another arbitrary (and larger) html text, ie wrap it in tags so that I can play with it using javascript.

By and large, this is just an extended text-search, ie "find me 2 'the's, 1 'fox', 1 'jumped' ..."

Three questions, reverend brothers:

  • What is the most efficient way of doing this?
  • The desired text will use the same word more than once. How do I avoid tagging the same instance of the word twice, and only tag as many instances as I desire?
  • And lastly, if a word can't be found, I want to make it from letters grabbed from other words. What's the best way of making sure I don't grab letters from the words I've previously grabbed?

    I was kind of hoping for a really gnarly, single regexp to do this, but as this is for a CGI script it needs above all to be fast.

    muchos gracias

    In reply to Highlighting a text inside another one. by TomSW

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