Javascript: highlight substring keeping original case but searching in case insensitive mode

Use a function for the second argument for .replace() that returns the actual matched string with the concatenated tags.

Try it out: http://jsfiddle.net/4sGLL/

reg = new RegExp(querystr, 'gi');
       // The str parameter references the matched string
       //    --------------------------------------v
final_str = 'foo ' + result.replace(reg, function(str) {return '<b>'+str+'</b>'});
$('#' + id).html(final_str);​

JSFiddle Example with Input: https://jsfiddle.net/pawmbude/

ES6 version

const highlight = (needle, haystack) =>
  haystack.replace(
      new RegExp(needle, 'gi'),
      (str) => `<strong>${str}</strong>`
  );

While the other answers so far seem simple, they can't be really used in many real world cases as they don't handle proper text HTML escaping and RegExp escaping. If you want to highlight every possible snippet, while escaping the text properly, a function like that would return all elements you should add to your suggestions box:

function highlightLabel(label, term) {
  if (!term) return [ document.createTextNode(label) ]
  const regex = new RegExp(term.replace(/[\\^$*+?.()|[\]{}]/g, '\\$&'), 'gi')
  const result = []
  let left, match, right = label
  while (match = right.match(regex)) {
    const m = match[0], hl = document.createElement('b'), i = match.index
    hl.innerText = m
    left = right.slice(0, i)
    right = right.slice(i + m.length)
    result.push(document.createTextNode(left), hl)
    if (!right.length) return result
  }
  result.push(document.createTextNode(right))
  return result
}