<Highlight /> with regex

[atumas-bananamilk]

In our case we need to highlight hashtags like this:

Mark or Highlight would do the job but they only accept lists:

We'd really need regex to achieve this I think.

[rtivital]

It is not a good idea to use Highlight for that, usually in such cases you should inject extra markup to HTML string before rendering it

[atumas-bananamilk]

The problem with injecting is we post that text to social media channels for users, and text sometimes gets messed up with random HTML.

[atumas-bananamilk]

Can we at least get some improvement on Textarea like this?

https://bonafideduck.github.io/react-highlight-within-textarea

[rtivital]

You can do that on your side, it should not be a part of the library

[yukidaruma]

Hi,

While I understand this request has been dismissed as "not a good idea in such cases", I’d like to point out some use cases where this suggestion could potentially be useful, hoping to encourage further discussion.

1. Extending character equivalence to other languages, e.g., "あ" to "ア" in Japanese
   While matching "A" to "a" is already supported for Latin text, there's no equivalent handling for Japanese Hiragana and Katakana.
   In Japanese search contexts, it’s common to treat "あ" (Hiragana) and "ア" (Katakana) as equivalent, as users often expect script-agnostic results.

   Currently, you can achieve this with highlight={["あ", "ア"]}, but this approach becomes tedious when patterns are longer or more complex. (I'm not familiar with other languages beyond Japanese, but a similar need might apply to diacritics like "á" in other scripts)

2. Limiting highlight to the prefix
   It could be helpful to highlight only the matching prefix portion of a word rather than other occurrences too.

   For example, if a user searches for "a," highlighting just the initial "a" in "application" (instead of the second "a" as well) could make the result more intuitive and visually precise.

Additionally, I think supporting a user-defined function would be more versatile than limiting it to regex.