I’m trying to get Search terms from within the Blog’s search engine to be highlighted. I’ve got the following code:

{if $smarty.request.s == ""}
    {$content}
{else}
    {assign var=hilite value="<span class='hilite'>"|cat:$smarty.request.s|cat:"</span>"}
    {$content|replace:$smarty.request.s:$hilite}
{/if}

This works fine, as long as the search term isn’t in a URL, or something like that. In that case, it breaks the URL.

To get around this, I need to only replace if it’s not inside an HTML tag. regex_replace to the rescue. This took me about 30 minutes to eventually figure out, a tipoff to wfinn at yakasha dot net, and the comment he made on the PHP documentation pages: 

{if $smarty.request.s == ""}
    {$content}
{else}
    {assign var=hilite value="<span class='hilite'>"|cat:$smarty.request.s|cat:"</span>"}
    {assign var=regex value="/(?![^< ]*?>)"|cat:$smarty.request.s|cat:"/"}
    {$content|regex_replace:$regex:$hilite}
{/if}

Obviously, you’ll need to have some sort of CSS styling for the search term.

.hilite {color:red; border:1px dashed; padding:0 3px; 0 3px;}
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