How To Wrap / Surround Highlighted Text With An Element

If the selection is completely contained within a single text node, you can do this using the surroundContents() method of the range you obtain from the selection. However, this is very brittle: it does not work if the selection cannot logically be surrounded in a single element (generally, if the range crosses node boundaries, although this is not the precise definition). To do this in the general case, you need a more complicated approach.

Also, DOM Range and window.getSelection() are not supported in IE < 9. You'll need another approach again for those browsers. You can use a library such as my own Rangy to normalize browser behaviour and you may find the class applier module useful for this question.

Simple surroundContents() example jsFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/VRcvn/

Code:

function surroundSelection(element) {
    if (window.getSelection) {
        var sel = window.getSelection();
        if (sel.rangeCount) {
            var range = sel.getRangeAt(0).cloneRange();
            range.surroundContents(element);
            sel.removeAllRanges();
            sel.addRange(range);
        }
    }
}

function wrapSelectedText() {       
    var selection= window.getSelection().getRangeAt(0);
    var selectedText = selection.extractContents();
    var span= document.createElement("span");
    span.style.backgroundColor = "yellow";
    span.appendChild(selectedText);
    selection.insertNode(span);
}

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<input type="button" onclick="wrapSelectedText();" value="Highlight" />

JS Fiddle.

Here's an attempt at a general solution that allows crossing element boundaries. Probably doesn't mix well with images, etc., nor non left-to-right text, but should be OK with simple cases.

First, here's a very general function for walking text nodes in the subtree defined by a Range object, from left to right. This will give us all the text we need as pieces:

function walkRange(range) {
    let ranges = [];
    
    let el = range.startContainer;
    let elsToVisit = true;
    while (elsToVisit) {
        let startOffset = el == range.startContainer ? range.startOffset : 0;
        let endOffset = el == range.endContainer ? range.endOffset : el.textContent.length;
        let r = document.createRange();
        r.setStart(el, startOffset);
        r.setEnd(el, endOffset);
        ranges.push(r);
        
        
        /// Move to the next text container in the tree order
        elsToVisit = false;
        while (!elsToVisit && el != range.endContainer) {
            let nextEl = getFirstTextNode(el.nextSibling);
            if (nextEl) {
                el = nextEl;
                elsToVisit = true;
            }
            else {
                if (el.nextSibling)      el = el.nextSibling;
                else if (el.parentNode)  el = el.parentNode;
                else                     break;
            }
        }
    }
    
    return ranges;
}

That makes use of this utility function for getting the first (leftmost) text node in a subtree:

function getFirstTextNode(el) {
    /// Degenerate cases: either el is null, or el is already a text node
    if (!el)               return null;
    if (el.nodeType == 3)  return el;
    
    for (let child of el.childNodes) {
        if (child.nodeType == 3) {
            return child;
        }
        else {
            let textNode = getFirstTextNode(child);
            if (textNode !== null) return textNode;
        }
    }
    
    return null;
}

Once you've called walkRanges, you can just use surroundContents on what it returns to actually do the highlighting/marking. Here it is in a function:

function highlight(range, className) {
    range = range.getRangeAt ? range.getRangeAt(0) : range;
    for (let r of walkRange(range)) {
        let mark = document.createElement('mark');
        mark.className = className;
        r.surroundContents(mark);
    }
}

and to unhighlight (assuming you used a unique class name for the highlight):

function unhighlight(sel) {
    document.querySelectorAll(sel).forEach(el => el.replaceWith(...el.childNodes));
}

Example usage:

highlight(document.getSelection(), 'mySelectionClassName');
unhighlight('.mySelectionClassName')

it is possible. You need to use the range API and the Range.surroundContents() method. It places the node the content is wrapped in at the start of the specified range. see https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/range.surroundContents