How to highlight input words in autocomplete jquery ui

Question

Could you please help me in highlighting the typed words in the auto complete text box. i am already populating the autocomplete words and i need to just highlight the typed

Answer 1

It seems to me you should overwrite the _renderItem method to have custom rendering of the items. The code could be about the following:

$("#studentName").autocomplete({/* all your parameters*/})
    .data("autocomplete")._renderItem = function (ul, item) {
        var newText = String(item.value).replace(
                new RegExp(this.term, "gi"),
                "$&");

        return $("
")
            .data("item.autocomplete", item)
            .append("
" + newText + "
")
            .appendTo(ul);
    };

In the code I use jQuery UI CSS "ui-state-highlight" for highlighting. You can use instead. Moreover I don't include the code which would escape any RegEx characters which could be inside of this.term. I wanted to explain you the main idea only. Look at the answer for example for additional information.

UPDATED: More recent versions of jQuery UI uses .data("ui-autocomplete") instead of .data("autocomplete"). To make your code working in both (old and new) versions of jQuery you can do something like the following:

var $elem = $("#studentName").autocomplete({/* all your parameters*/}),
    elemAutocomplete = $elem.data("ui-autocomplete") || $elem.data("autocomplete");
if (elemAutocomplete) {
    elemAutocomplete._renderItem = function (ul, item) {
        var newText = String(item.value).replace(
                new RegExp(this.term, "gi"),
                "$&");

        return $("
")
            .data("item.autocomplete", item)
            .append("
" + newText + "
")
            .appendTo(ul);
    };
}

UPDATED 2: In the same way the name "item.autocomplete" should be changed to "ui-autocomplete-item". See here.