Highlight an individual word within a text block on hover

Question

In javascript/jQuery, is there a way to identify a word in a text block/paragraph? For example, say I have the following paragraph:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris suscipit interdum fermentum. Aenean fermentum imperdiet augue, et venenatis lectus semper vel. Phasellus faucibus nulla in quam egestas eleifend. Cras tristique augue eget libero tristique condimentum. Mauris eget diam eget risus feugiat rutrum. Duis placerat lorem quis augue semper porttitor. Nullam iaculis dui feugiat erat condimentum rutrum. Sed at accumsan diam. Maecenas ut urna id velit posuere auctor in vel dui. Aenean consectetur dui in leo faucibus sed feugiat dui blandit. In accumsan diam vitae erat volutpat volutpat aliquam nunc euismod. Vivamus viverra lorem nulla. Quisque justo quam, adipiscing sit amet auctor non, laoreet sit amet nisl. Donec euismod lorem ac mi dictum volutpat. Donec ligula mi, varius ac auctor at, sollicitudin id elit. In auctor sodales ipsum nec consectetur. Sed lacinia varius nibh vitae vulputate.

If I hover my mouse cursor over the first word, "Lorem", I would like it to become bold (for example). Basically, I would like just the text that the cursor is over to have a CSS property added to it on mouseover, then have that CSS property removed when the cursor is no longer on top of that word.

The only way I can think of doing this is to add a <span> tag between each and every word. Is this the only way? Is there a more efficient way perhaps, or does jQuery's mouseover event only work within tags? Can it work in identifying text blocks?

Answer 1

This seems like a good task for http://letteringjs.com/

You can set it up to create the spans for you at word barriers.

JSFiddle with your example: http://jsfiddle.net/3HdKH/

From their tutorial: https://github.com/davatron5000/Lettering.js/wiki/Wrapping-words-with-lettering%28%27words%27%29

Using:

$(document).ready(function() {
  $(".word_split").lettering('words');
});

This

<p class="word_split">Don't break my heart.</p>

Becomes:

<p class="word_split">
  <span class="word1">Don't</span>
  <span class="word2">break</span>
  <span class="word3">my</span>
  <span class="word4">heart.</span>
</p>

Then you can use the following CSS:

.word_split span:hover {
    font-weight:bold;
}

Answer 2

Here's a technique I've used that wraps span tags around all words in a parent element so that they can be highlighted on hover:

const parentElement = document.getElementById('parent');

parentElement.onmouseover = e => {
  e.target.innerHTML = e.target.innerText.replace(/([\w]+)/g, '<span>$1</span>');
};

p#parent span:hover {
  background: yellow;
  cursor: pointer;
}

<p id="parent">One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked. "What's happened to me?" he thought. It wasn't a dream. His room, a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls. A collection of textile samples lay spread out on the table - Samsa was a travelling salesman - and above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and housed in a nice, gilded frame. It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer. Gregor then turned to look out the window at the dull weather. </p>

This code adds a click handler for words in list items:

parentElement.onmouseover = e => {
  if (e.target.nodeName === 'LI') {
    e.target.innerHTML = 
      e.target.innerText.replace(/([\w]+)/g, '<span>$1</span>');
    e.target.onclick = e => {
      doSomething(e.target.textContent);
    };
  }
}