How do I turn on search highlighting from a vim script?

Question

If I do either of the following two:

call search("searchString")

exec "/ searchString"

From a script, then vim does the search but does not highlight the results, even though hlsearch. Doing the same searches from outside a script highlights the results.

Answer 1

Just found out the answer myself:

call search(l:searchString)
call matchadd('Search', l:searchString)

Answer 2

The

feedkeys()

function is the key (pun intended):

call feedkeys("/pattern\<CR>")

or cleaner:

" highlights – or doesn’t – according to 'hlsearch' option
function SearcH(pattern)
    let @/ = a:pattern
    call feedkeys("/\<CR>")
endfunction