How to highlight word in html

[rahul taiwala]

How to highlight all words in html one by one using javascript?
Any idea how to proceed?
I have tried a lot of things but I get confused when it comes to deeply nested tags.

[Ulf Dittmer]

What do you have now, and where, exactly, are you having problems to proceed?

[rahul taiwala]

I am using this code to highlight each word one by one in a html document, but it is not that good method.
And It faces some problem for some words, if white space between two word is more than one, or if return character is encountered more than once

var ie4 = false; if(document.all) { ie4 = true; } function setContent(name, value) { var d; if (ie4) { d = document.all[name]; } else { d = document.getElementById(name); } d.innerHTML = value; } function getContent(name) { var d; if (ie4) { d = document.all[name]; } else { d = document.getElementById(name); } return d.innerHTML; } function setColor(name, value) { var d; if (ie4) { d = document.all[name]; } else { d = document.getElementById(name); } d.style.background = value; } function getColor(name) { var d; if (ie4) { d = document.all[name]; } else { d = document.getElementById(name); } return d.style.color; } function animate(name, col) { var value = getContent(name); //if (value.indexOf('<span') >= 0) { return; } var length = 0; var str = ''; var ch; var token = ''; var htmltag = false; for (i = 0; i < value.length; i++) { ch = value.substring(i, i+1); if (i < value.length - 1) { nextch = value.substring(i+1, i+2); } else { nextch = ' '; } token += ch; if (ch == '<' && '/aAbBpPhHiIoOuUlLtT'.indexOf(nextch) >= 0) { htmltag = true; } if (ch == '>' && htmltag) { htmltag = false; } if (!htmltag && ch.charCodeAt(0) > 30 && ch != ' ' && ch != '\n') { var k=i; var wrd=""; if(token.length==1){ while(value.substring(k,k+1)!=' '){ wrd +=value.substring(k,k+1); k++; i++; } token=wrd +" ";} str += '<span id="' + name + '_' + length + '">' + token + '</span>'; token = ''; length++; wrd=''; } } setContent(name, str); command = 'animateloop(\'' + name + '\', ' + length + ', 0, 1, \'' + col + '\')'; setTimeout(command , 300); } function animateloop(name, length, ind, delta, col) { var next = ind + delta; //if (next >= length) { delta = delta * -1; next = ind + delta; } if (next < 0) { delta = delta * -1; next = ind + delta; } setColor(name + '_' + ind, getColor(name + '_' + next)); setColor(name + '_' + next, col); command = 'animateloop(\'' + name + '\', ' + length + ', ' + next + ', ' + delta + ', \'' + col + '\')'; setTimeout(command , 300); }

[Bear Bibeault]

That's a lot of code to something as simple as highlighting. What are the requirements? How are the words identified for highlighting? What does highlighting even mean?

[rahul taiwala]

I need to highlight-meaning change the background color of each and every word in the html document one after another using javascript.

[Bear Bibeault]

That's still not enough of a description for us to help. What constitutes a word? And where? In attributes? Content only? You seem to have some animation code in there; your description doesn't mention animation.

This seems like an academic exercise. Is it homework?

Why aren't you using jQuery to make this all much easier?

[Ulf Dittmer]

There's code to deal especially with IE4 Seriously, wherever you got that code from, never again go there.

[rahul taiwala]

Suppose I have Paragraph tag which contains some string like-
<p>A friendly place for programming greenhorns Big Moose Saloon</p>

Here, word is a sequence of character separated by white space, so here words are-A,friendly,place,for,programming,greenhorns,Big,Moose,Saloon
Now I need to change the background color of each word starting from "A" to "Saloon", one by one.

[Bear Bibeault]

Please answer my other questions.

So, the first step is to push the keyboard away, and write down how you would do this step by step. You should not write a single line of code until you have this in place.

[rahul taiwala]

In content only, And no its not a home assignment.