Question

I currently have:

    $('.tweet').text(function (_, text) {

        var exp = /(#(\S+))/g;

        return text.replace(exp, '<a href="http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23$2">
                                      `$1 
                                  </a>'
                           );  

    });

This create the essentially something like:

<a href="http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23data">#data </a>

but it still displays as text and not a link.

Image example:

Answer 1

Use .html() instead of .text().

If you use .text(), your HTML will be escaped:

We need to be aware that this method escapes the string provided as
necessary so that it will render correctly in HTML. To do so, it calls
the DOM method .createTextNode(), which replaces special characters
with their HTML entity equivalents (such as < for <).

jsFiddle Example with .html()