How Can I Match And Return Multiple Instances Of A String, Where Single Apostrophes Could Be Contained At Any Index?

Please note, the 'C#' tag was included intentionally, because I could accept C# syntax for my answer here, as I have the option of doing this both client-side and server-side. Read

Solution 1:

I'm copying this answer from your earlier question.

I think after reading the comments on the other answers, I've figured out what it is you're going for. You don't need a single regex that can do this for any possible input, you already have input, and you need to build a regex that matches it and its variations. What you need to do is this. To be clear, since you misinterpreted in your question, the following syntax is actually in JavaScript.

var re = new RegExp("'?" + "farmers".split("").join("'?") + "'?", "i")

What this does is take your input string, "farmers" and split it into a list of the individual characters.

"farmers".split("") == [ 'f', 'a', 'r', 'm', 'e', 'r', 's' ]

It then stitches the characters back together again with "'?" between them. In a regular expression, this means that the ' character will be optional. I add the same particle to the beginning and end of the expression to match at the beginning and end of the string as well.

This will create a regex that matches in the way you're describing, provided it's OK that it also matches the original string.

In this case, the above line builds this regex:

/'?f'?a'?r'?m'?e'?r'?s'?/

EDIT

After looking at this a bit, and the function you're using, I think your best bet will be to modify the highlight function to use a regex instead of a straight string replacement. I don't think it'll even be that hard to deal with. Here's a completely untested stab at it.

functioninnerHighlight(node, pat) {
    var skip = 0;
    if (node.nodeType == 3) {
        var matchResult = pat.exec(node.data);  // exec the regex instead of toUpperCase-ing the stringvar pos = matchResult !== null ? matchResult.index : -1;  // index is the location of where the matching text is foundif (pos >= 0) {
            var spannode = document.createElement('span');
            spannode.className = 'highlight';
            var middlebit = node.splitText(pos);
            var endbit = middlebit.splitText(matchResult[0].length);  // matchResult[0] is the last matching characters.var middleclone = middlebit.cloneNode(true);
            spannode.appendChild(middleclone);
            middlebit.parentNode.replaceChild(spannode, middlebit);
            skip = 1;
        }
    }
    elseif (node.nodeType == 1 && node.childNodes && !/(script|style)/i.test(node.tagName)) {
        for (var i = 0; i < node.childNodes.length; ++i) {
            i += innerHighlight(node.childNodes[i], pat);
        }
    }
    return skip;
 }

What I'm attempting to do here is keep the existing logic, but use the Regex that I built to do the finding and splitting of the string. Note that I'm not doing the toUpper call anymore, but that I've made the regex case insensitive instead. As noted, I didn't test this at all, but it seems like it should be pretty close to a working solution. Enough to get you started anyway.

Note that this won't get you your hidden fields. I'm not sure what you need those for, but this will (if it's right) take care of highlighting the string.