PHP JQuery Autocomplete

Making an auto-suggestion script, something that reads your input and shows related matches as you type, can be quite a challenge. It’s been made very popular by the big search engines. Yahoo did it first, and now Google has Instant which is killing its competitors. But how do you get one on your site? Luckily, jQuery has given us a very simple solution: http://jqueryui.com/demos/autocomplete/.

Let’s pretend you are making a website for a client who has multiple locations all throughout the United States. They ask you to build a form which takes a zipcode and spits out locations surrounding that zipcode. They also request, that, as the user types their zipcode, a suggestion box appears showing them relevant matches.

jQuery’s autocomplete makes this an easy task. The first thing you need to do, obviously, is create your form. Make sure you give your search box an id attribute, as it’s easier to work with that way.