Question

In my project, I am trying to highlight a text(only usernames) whenever represented with @. I am using the following function:

function replaceMessage(data, username) {
    return data.replace("@" + username, "<strong>@" + username + "</strong>");
}

This above function is working but if there are two valid users with names such as “Sam” and “Samuel” then the result after applying function is becoming something like this:

           Sam and Samuel (Instead of Samuel).

How to solve this issue?

I am not that much good in using Regex, I tried the below function which is not working in IE8..

function replaceMessage(data, username) {
    return data.replace(/\b + "@" + username + /g, "<strong>@" + username + "</strong>");
}

Answer 1

You’re going to need the special symbol \b which denotes a word break in a regular expression:

function replaceMessage(data, username) {
    var re = new RegExp('@' + username + '\\b', 'g');
    return data.replace(re, "<strong>$0</strong>");
}