First off, i wanted to just say thanks to the people who are reading my posts and helping me with my syntax and logic problems. This has been a really great community to share code and learn from people.

Now with that said...

My code here searches an html element for what contains a string. Once the string is matched than the attributes are applied. My only problem, i feel like this code isnt meeting its true potential of being EASY! And second, if search my element for lets say, "i" than all words with i in it have attributes applied. I want to just target a single i if it is alone ya know.

var newText = $("pre").text().split(" ").join(" ");
	 newText = "<code>" + newText + "";

	 $("pre").html( newText )
	 	 .find('code')
	 	   .end()       
	 	     .find(":contains(' anyword ')")
	 	       .addClass('hilite')    
	 	         .css({"font-style":"italic", "font-weight":"bolder"});

If you say that im reinventing the wheel and just use a plugin, well lol, im mainly doing this kind of thing so i can learn, get used to the syntax, and just have fun with it. jQuery has turned my world around and i cant soak up enough info.

Thanks in advance, in case i dont respond quick enough, been super D duper busy...
http://jsfiddle.net/john_motyl/tgnU2/

EDIT: i was just thinking that maybe regular expressions might do the trick with some white space checking, anyone know how to implement? Declare the regex as a var and test the var against what im searching for?