Highlighting is used to visually distinguish fragments that match keywords within search results.

Highlighted fragments are surrounded by an HTML tag. Using the fluent API, you can request highlighting as part of a projection expression passed to the [Select method](🔗). To do so, invoke the `AsHighlighted` extension method on a string property.

Assume you indexed instances of a `BlogPost` class with a `Title` and `Content` property. Search for `BlogPost` and retrieve the `Title` and a highlight from the `Content` property like this.

## Overwrite default styling

By default, highlighted keywords are wrapped in **\<em>** tags. To overwrite this styling, pass to the `AsHighlighted` method an instance of the `HighlightSpec` class, and set its `PreTag` and `PostTag` properties.

## Control fragment number and length

By default, the entire field is highlighted and retrieved. This is usually desired for shorter fields, but for longer fields, you probably want to extract one or a few fragments instead. To achieve this, set the `NumberOfFragments` property on the `HighlightSpec` instance.

You can also control the length of fragments by setting the `FragmentSize` property. If you do not, the server default value of 100 is used.

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Note

Do not set the `FragmentSize` property to a value lower than 18.

As an example, the following code retrieves a single fragment that is 200 characters long (excluding HTML tags used to wrap keywords) for the **Content** field.

## Determine concatenated fragments

If you set `NumberOfFragments` to a value greater than one, multiple fragments are passed from the server. The fragments are automatically concatenated with a space ( ) between them. To override this, pass in a `Func<IEnumerable<string>, string>` to the `HighlightSpec` `Concatenation` method.

The previous example uses an extension method that concatenates fragments and places an elipsis (...) between each. You can perform more complex operations.

## Ensure projected property is not empty

If there are no highlights for the requested field, the projected property is an empty string. To ensure that the property value is not empty, use an if statement.

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Note

If statement is executed in memory. So, in the above example, the highlight and the Title property are retrieved from the server, which means that more data is sent over the wire. That is usually not a problem, but something to be aware of.

## Highlight with typed search

_Typed search_ provides different ways to implement the highlighting and encoding of search results.

## Highlight with unified search

When using **unified search**, HTML encoding is enabled by default for the **Title** and **Excerpt** fields. The text is encoded before the HTML tags that surround highlighted content are added. You can disable default HTML encoding, see [Unified Search](🔗).