Text Highlighter Question

The text highlighter question allows respondents to mark one or more sections of a passage by selecting and highlighting text. This question type is useful for understanding which phrases, ideas, or statements stand out to respondents.

Other Names and Formats

A Text Highlighter Question is also called a highlight question, text selection question, or text markup task. Respondents select phrases or passages in a supplied text sample, and the selected text is recorded for analysis.

How it works

Respondents are shown a block of text. They can drag to select any portion of the text, which is then highlighted using the configured color. Multiple, non-contiguous selections are supported.

Each selection is recorded as a nonempty, case-sensitive substring of the passage, and the question returns the selections as a ListResponse.

Survey Experience

• Respondents can highlight one or more parts of the passage before continuing.
• Every selection must be a nonempty, case-sensitive substring of text_to_highlight; empty strings, missing substrings, and non-string selections are rejected.
• The highlight color is configurable with the color option.

Traditional Experience	Traditional Mobile Optimized	Chat Experience

Explicit Don't know response

Set dont_know_option="Don't know" to offer an explicit opt-out for the whole question. It is exclusive of highlighted selections. The response is a singleton list containing the configured label, even though that label is not a substring of the source text.

Configuration Options

Option	Type	Required	Default	Description
dont_know_option	str	no	''	Optional explicit opt-out label; per row for grids, otherwise for the whole question
question	string	yes	-	The prompt shown to the user
text_to_highlight	string	yes	-	The text from which respondents can select and highlight portions
color	string	no	#FFFF00 (yellow)	Highlight color as exactly six hexadecimal digits prefixed by #; letter case is ignored. Other values raise SurveyValidationError
default	str, list[str], or list[list[str]]	no	random highlights	Default highlights for test data: a string for one highlight, a list of strings for one full highlight response, or a list of highlight-list candidates — each simulated respondent picks one at random
number_seconds	int	no	0	Seconds to wait before allowing the respondent to continue
tags	s.tag()	no	-	Used to fill tokens in text and group questions in reports
id	str | None	no	None	Optional stable identifier for this question

Example Code

pythonCopy
from survey import Survey
s = Survey(**globals())

s.text_highlighter_question(
    "Please highlight the parts of the following text that you find most interesting:",
    text_to_highlight="The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
)