Highlight a word with jQuery

Question

I basically need to highlight a particular word in a block of text. For example, pretend I wanted to highlight the word "dolor" in this text:

Answer 1

I wrote a very simple function that uses jQuery to iterate the elements wrapping each keyword with a .highlight class.

function highlight_words(word, element) {
    if(word) {
        var textNodes;
        word = word.replace(/\W/g, '');
        var str = word.split(" ");
        $(str).each(function() {
            var term = this;
            var textNodes = $(element).contents().filter(function() { return this.nodeType === 3 });
            textNodes.each(function() {
              var content = $(this).text();
              var regex = new RegExp(term, "gi");
              content = content.replace(regex, '' + term + '');
              $(this).replaceWith(content);
            });
        });
    }
}

More info:

http://www.hawkee.com/snippet/9854/