highlight-words-core

What is highlight-words-core?

The highlight-words-core npm package is a utility for finding and highlighting words within a string. It is particularly useful for search functionalities where you need to emphasize the search terms within the results.

What are highlight-words-core's main functionalities?

Highlight Words

This feature allows you to find and highlight specific words within a given text. The `findAll` function takes an object with `searchWords` and `textToHighlight` properties and returns an array of chunks indicating the positions of the highlighted words.

const { findAll } = require('highlight-words-core');

const textToHighlight = 'This is a sample text to highlight certain words.';
const searchWords = ['sample', 'highlight'];
const chunks = findAll({
  searchWords,
  textToHighlight
});

console.log(chunks);

Case Insensitive Search

This feature allows you to perform a case-insensitive search. By setting the `caseSensitive` option to `false`, the search will ignore case differences between the search words and the text.

const { findAll } = require('highlight-words-core');

const textToHighlight = 'This is a Sample text to Highlight certain words.';
const searchWords = ['sample', 'highlight'];
const chunks = findAll({
  searchWords,
  textToHighlight,
  autoEscape: true,
  caseSensitive: false
});

console.log(chunks);

Escape Special Characters

This feature allows you to escape special characters in the search words. By setting the `autoEscape` option to `true`, special characters in the search words will be escaped, preventing them from being interpreted as regular expressions.

const { findAll } = require('highlight-words-core');

const textToHighlight = 'This is a sample text with special characters like * and ?.';
const searchWords = ['*', '?'];
const chunks = findAll({
  searchWords,
  textToHighlight,
  autoEscape: true
});

console.log(chunks);

Other packages similar to highlight-words-core

react-highlight-words

The react-highlight-words package provides similar functionality but is specifically designed for React applications. It allows you to highlight words within a React component, making it more suitable for front-end development compared to highlight-words-core, which is a more general utility.

highlight.js

The highlight.js package is a syntax highlighter for code, which can also be used to highlight words within a text. However, it is more focused on code syntax highlighting rather than general text highlighting, making it a bit different in scope compared to highlight-words-core.

mark.js

The mark.js package is a versatile library for highlighting text. It offers more advanced features like custom element creation, regular expression support, and more. It is more feature-rich compared to highlight-words-core, which is simpler and more focused on basic word highlighting.

README

Utility functions shared by react-highlight-words and react-native-highlight-words.

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API

The primary API for this package is a function exported as findAll. This method searches a string of text for a set of search terms and returns an array of "chunks" that describe the matches found.

Each "chunk" is an object consisting of a pair of indices (chunk.start and chunk.end) and a boolean specfifying whether the chunk is a match (chunk.highlight). For example:

import { findAll } from "highlight-words-core";

const textToHighlight = "This is some text to highlight.";
const searchWords = ["This", "i"];

const chunks = findAll({
  searchWords,
  textToHighlight
});

const highlightedText = chunks
  .map(chunk => {
    const { end, highlight, start } = chunk;
    const text = textToHighlight.substr(start, end - start);
    if (highlight) {
      return `<mark>${text}</mark>`;
    } else {
      return text;
    }
  })
  .join("");

Run this example on Code Sandbox.

findAll

The findAll function accepts several parameters, although only the searchWords array and textToHighlight string are required.

Parameter	Required?	Type	Description
autoEscape		boolean	Escape special regular expression characters
caseSensitive		boolean	Search should be case sensitive
findChunks		Function	Custom find function (advanced)
sanitize		Function	Custom sanitize function (advanced)
searchWords	✅	Array<string>	Array of words to search for
textToHighlight	✅	string	Text to search and highlight

License

MIT License - fork, modify and use however you want.