Question

I’m working on an E-Book that will be published to my website. I want to mimic OSX spotlight feature where someone can use a my fixed search bar and input text that is then highlighted on the page for them. I was trying to use Sphider but no such luck on getting this result.

•found this similar thread but not exactly what I’m looking for.

Answer 1

You could use a string replace to surround all text that needs to be highlighted with a span tag. Then create a CSS class for that span tag.

<?php

$searchString = $_POST['search'];
$EBOOK = str_replace($searchString, "<span class='highlighted'>$searchString</span>", $EBOOK);

Then some CSS

.highlighted {
  background-color:yellow;
}

To take it to the next step you could use javascript to scroll the user’s web browser to the first location of a span.highlighted.

Note I wouldn’t use a regular expression to replace search string value (ie preg_replace) because the user’s search input could contain special characters used by regex that may need to be escaped.

This is all theoretical of course… based on your question.

Edit: just thought of something, Ebook content will contain HTML tags so if you were to use a string replace function like I suggested. Take into consideration to not allow the tags to be searched and replaced. A regular expression replace may be needed in this case