I have a textarea that displays text with special formatting code within it such as terms surrounded by square brackets or astericks, for example.

How would it be possible to have a button that allows the user to cycle through the special characters highlighting them.

An example might help. Say the text looked like:

This is just an [[example]]. I might want something in **italics** or something in another &&format&&. There are many different %*%codes%*%.

Would it be possible to have a button that, for instance, highlights [[ or ]] with each click similar to a "Find Next" function? There would be a different button for each format, like one that cycles through the textarea's ** codes.

Thanks very much for any responses.

I searched web a lot but couldn't find any references to solve your problem. I guess the textarea is not good enough to achive your requirements. I suggest you go for a richtexteditor instead. It will even give you a WYSIWYG feature which allows entering html contents very easily (without knowing html) and is easier to use than bbcode parser.