Unstyled React component to apply multiple text highlight/decorations within a larger body of text.

Live demo (Source)

npm i @letientai299/react-decorated-text

import DecoratedText, { match } from '@letientai299/react-decorated-text';

function Demo() {
  const text =
    'Give a man a program, and frustrate him for a day. ' +
    'Teach a man to program, frustrate him for a lifetime.';
  const decors = [
    // render to <mark>{children}</mark> by default
    ...match(text, 'man'),
    // search using regexp, render custom element that wrap the matches
    ...match(text, /p\w+m/, (p) => (
      <span style={{ color: 'red' }}>{p.children}</span>
    )),
  ];
  return <DecoratedText text={text} decors={decors} />;
}

DecoratedText takes these props:

• text: required, the body of text to display.
• decors: not required, list of Decor to be rendered within the text. Internally, the component will compute the overlap of those decors and generate the sub components
• as: not required, can be used to change the default HTML tag (span) to wrap the text.

The match function is just a helper to support most common use cases: search the text for some words or a regexp and render those matches using a React components. Its output is Decor[].

For advanced use cases, instead of match, you might want to implement your own function to compute Decor[]. Below is how Decor is defined (simplified).

type Decor = {
  range: [number, number];
  render?: (props: PropsWithChildren) => ReactElement;
};

See the live demo source code for some example.

This is designed to build a filterable menu, list or tree, in which the item text are: unstructured, immutable, can have some other overlapping decorations. One of such example is the project explorer in Jetbrains IDE.

This is not designed to work with structured text (e.g. code), or dynamic content (inside a web-based editor). Such cases requires deeper knowledge of the text (e.g. Abstract syntax tree, tokens), thus, requires other tools.

Some other libraries, such as react-highlighter and react-highlight-words, only support single match query and single style against all matches. This one is more low level, but also more powerful:

• Can render the matches using any React element
• Can use multiple search query, or implement your own search.

That said, this design leaves the many responsibilities to you, the users:

• Make sure the searching is correct and fast
• Handle accessibility for text segments, especially in those overlapped segments. This page might be helpful: How to Accessibly Split Text

MIT