jQuery Autocomplete Plugin that triggers after token

Question

I\'m building an application, and would like to do an autocomplete within a textarea, much like how Twitter/Facebook does theirs with the @[name]. However, I would like to

Answer 1

This is indeed possible. You can tap into the autocomplete widget's events (search and select) to accomplish this:

var triggered = false;
var trigger = "TDI:";

$("input").autocomplete({
    source: [...],
    search: function() {
        if (!triggered) {
            return false;
        }
    },
    select: function(event, ui) {
        var text = this.value;
        var pos = text.lastIndexOf(trigger);

        this.value = text.substring(0, pos + trigger.length) +
            ui.item.value;

        triggered = false;

        return false;
    },
    focus: function() { return false; },
    minLength: 0
}).bind("keyup", function() {
    var text = this.value;
    var len = text.length;
    var last;
    var query;
    var index;

    if (triggered) {
        index = text.lastIndexOf(trigger);
        query = text.substring(index + trigger.length);
        $(this).autocomplete("search", query);
    }
    else if (len >= trigger.length) {
        last = text.substring(len - trigger.length);
        triggered = (last === trigger);
    }
});

Demo here: http://jsfiddle.net/andrewwhitaker/kCkga/

Notes:

• This is a very limited demo. It will not work if you try to make it autocomplete in the middle of the string.
• To complete this example, you'd need to do some work with figuring out the position of the cursor in the input field and inserting the text there instead
• Probably other bugs, but I definitely think it's doable. Hope this gets you started.

Answer 2

I have created a plugin for that, which uses jQuery-UI Autocomplete and Andrew's example (thanks for that).

Url: https://github.com/experteer/autocompleteTrigger

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/dmattes/2YRgW/1/

$('input,textarea').autocompleteTrigger({
  triggerStart : '@',
  triggerEnd: '',
  source: [
    "Asp",
    "BASIC",
    "COBOL",
    "ColdFusion",
    "Erlang",
    "Fortran",
    "Groovy",
    "Java",
    "JavaScript",
    "Lisp",
    "Perl",
    "PHP",
    "Python",
    "Ruby",
    "Scala",
    "Scheme"
  ]
});

Best, Daniel