Highlighting text in a QTextBrowser

Robert Hairgrove

I am implementing a search function for my help viewer based on QTextBrowser. What I would like to do, once a page has been loaded containing the search item text, is to highlight each of the occurrences of the text with background color = yellow. The user can then reload the document (hitting F5 calls the widget's reload() function) to remove the highlighting.

It appears that I can fetch the text block from the QTextDocument and the corresponding QTextFormat easily enough, but it seems that there is no way to edit it (i.e., change the background color of a selection)?

What would be the best way to implement this?

Chris Kawa

If all you have is plain text you can just replace the formatting for the selected part like this:

QTextCharFormat fmt;
fmt.setBackground(Qt::yellow);

QTextCursor cursor(textBrowser->document());
cursor.setPosition(start_pos, QTextCursor::MoveAnchor);
cursor.setPosition(end_pos, QTextCursor::KeepAnchor);
cursor.setCharFormat(fmt);

If you have some formatting you will have to iterate over text blocks in that range, get the format from them, modify the color and set back.

SGaist

Hi,

Looks like a job for QSyntaxHighlighter.

Robert Hairgrove

@Chris-Kawa , @SGaist : Thank you very much for the suggestions. Will this also work for HTML text?

Chris Kawa

@Robert-Hairgrove said in Highlighting text in a QTextBrowser:

Will this also work for HTML text?

Html is only an input/output format. Internally QTextBrowser stores content in QDocument the same whether it's plaint text, rich text, markdown or html.

Robert Hairgrove

@Chris-Kawa Thanks! Now I need to test this.

Robert Hairgrove

@Chris-Kawa ... Thank you, this works like a charm!