Question

I need a way to go through all the text on my page, including links and other controls and find words that are in a certain list and add the html character entity ™ (™) to them.
I need this to be fast too.
The list is held in a javascript array. I’ve already got code using .each to find all Links on the page with text from that list, but it’s noticeably slow and I don’t like that.

Any better, more efficient ways to do this?

EDIT

People are suggesting other alternatives (server-side, css, etc.)
We can’t use those because these words are in URL’s all over the site. We would mess up our URL’s all over the site. We are using DotNetNuke to do this and the client just told us today that every time their products appear on the entire site (including links) they want them to be in all caps and have TM appended.
If we change the products in the database, all the links suddenly have “trade” appended to the end of them.
The nature of DNN says that we can’t do this server-side.
We could go through and manually change it in each page…but the site is 1,900+ pages……
SO! Client side is the route we want to go.

Answer 1

Do a regex search/replace. In theory, this should be faster than marcgg’s method since you are touching DOM only once.

var wordList = ["jQuery UI", "jQuery", "is"];
var regExp = new RegExp("\\b" + wordList.join("\\b|\\b") + "\\b", "g");
var $elem = $("#divWithText");
console.log(regExp);
$elem.html($elem.html().replace(regExp, "$&™"));

Caveat:

1. This will also nuke any scripts that may be inside the div since the script elements are not re-parsed.
2. Same applies to any html tag that matches your regex.