Here’s my take, it’s short but not perfect…

…

this dumbass ajax form is not working!…

Revision 2, this time passing in list of words to highlight as a function argument like macournoyer did (first reply), which is much better than accessing a named variable outside of the function….

Sorry about the form not working Jason, should be fixed now…

Good solutions above. This is overkill, but can’t think of anything else that hasn’t already been done….

i purposely wrote this without looking at the refactorings… funny how close it still is but it’s a bit different. a little more verbose imo but extensible. the only issue i have with it is that you are limited to one a single delimiter….

I’m sure the String#pad (not sure about the name either) utility function added here is available somewhere, but anyways. Also using the block version of gsub this time….

@Marc,

Thanks! About the rubyize-this shirts, I’m starting to think about it seriously

There are already better versions here…

Nothing major here, just made it case insensitive. An issue I have is that hyphenated words like “monkey-wrench” will still get highlighted and I have no idea how to get the regexp to ignore words beginning or ending with a -….

Probably went overboard….

another one, neither of these work on contractions, this one features recursion and only involves modifying string.

This one outputs:
*hello* world, what’s *up*?

…

found a bug in that one, didnt work when you had a full sentence and passed in a mark.

This one will correctly output +hello+ world, what’s +up+?

I’m going to stop now, sorry for the triple post….

How i did it….

Regexp.union is your friend! This also demonstrates a typical use of the splat operator to turn an array into an argument list, and the usage of back-references in global substitutions. One thing that I found recently is that your replacement string …

Now having read some of the others, I’ll borrow from Simon’s idea:…