jquery autocomplete to start on pressing character '@'

Question

I have a textarea in which I write messages. I want to activate jquery autocomplete for certain condition like - when user presses '@', they should start seeing the suggestion till they dont press space.

It is something similar to facebook style @friends prediction.

Does jquery inherently support this? Any ideas?

Answer 1

I think the easiest way to do this is to provide a function to source. Something like this:

textbox.autocomplete({
    source: function (request, response) {
        var lastWord = request.term.split(/,\s*/).pop();
        if (lastWord.indexOf('@') == -1) {
            return [];
        }
        $.getJSON('YourUrl' + lastWord, {}, function (data) {
            response(values);
        });
    }
});

This will only work if the last part is the one being autocompleted though.

Answer 2

$('#target').keydown(function(event) {
  if (event.keyCode == 64) {
     //do something for @
   }
  if (event.keyCode == 32) {
     //do something for space
   }
});

you can see ajax samples in google -> "jquery ajax"