Highlight search terms (select only leaf nodes)

Question

I would like to highlight search terms on a page, but not mess with any HTML tags. I was thinking of something like:

$('.searchResult *').each(function() {
    $(this.html($(this).html().replace(new RegExp('(term)', 'gi'), '<span class="highlight">$1</span>'));
)};

However, $('.searchResult *').each matches all elements, not just leaf nodes. In other words, some of the elements matched have HTML inside them. So I have a few questions:

1. How can I match only leaf nodes?
2. Is there some built-in jQuery RegEx function to simplify things? Something like: $(this).wrap('term', $('<span />', { 'class': 'highlight' }))
3. Is there a way to do a simple string replace and not a RegEx?
4. Any other better/faster way of doing this?

Thanks so much!

Answer 1

[See it in action]

// escape by Colin Snover
// Note: if you don't care for (), you can remove it..
RegExp.escape = function(text) {
    return text.replace(/[-[\]{}()*+?.,\\^$|#\s]/g, "\\$&");
}

function highlight(term, base) {
  if (!term) return;
  base = base || document.body;
  var re = new RegExp("(" + RegExp.escape(term) + ")", "gi"); //... just use term
  var replacement = "<span class='highlight'>" + term + "</span>";
  $("*", base).contents().each( function(i, el) {
    if (el.nodeType === 3) {
      var data = el.data;
      if (data = data.replace(re, replacement)) {
        var wrapper = $("<span>").html(data);
        $(el).before(wrapper.contents()).remove();
      }
    }
  });
}

function dehighlight(term, base) {
  var text = document.createTextNode(term);
  $('span.highlight', base).each(function () {
    this.parentNode.replaceChild(text.cloneNode(false), this);
  });
}