mark text in a string with regular expression but exclude links

Question

I have a text and I want when a user search for a term, the term becomes highlighted by wrapping the term with mark tag.

javascript to wrap the match term:

Answer 1

1. You're reinverting the wheel
2. Using innerHTML will destroy events
3. Using innerHTML will trigger regeneration of the DOM

To make thins easy you should use an existing plugin. There are many jQuery plugins out there, but as you haven't added the jquery tag I assume that you're searching a plain JS solution. Then the only plugin is mark.js.

Example of your use case

Answer 2

Use a negative lookahead to add an additional constraint that the term is not followed by a > without first having a <. This will effectively exclude matches within <...> markup.

var pattern = new RegExp('('+term+')(?![^<]*>)', 'gi');

https://jsfiddle.net/qdk80o0k/