I currently have a brief to develop a system to help people find addresses in a list loaded into a web page. At the moment they're displayed as a single long list (a ul), and the oser clicks the one he wants to use. The problem is that in some cases this list can run to hundreds of entries.
The first plan was to simply have a button to click on the page that invokes the browser's ctrl-f behaviour, but there doesn't seem to be a sensible cross-browser way to do it. My second idea was to use jQuery and one of the autocomplete plugins, convert the list into the data the autocomplete plugin needs to operate on and suggest addresses as users type into the field. This seemed a better approach but then I hit a problem that the autocomplete plugins that I've found so far all seem to search on exact phrases, which is not going to be very useful. Addresses in the list are in the format <recipient name>, <address>, <postcode> so a user would have to start by entering the name of the recipient followed by the address and post code for the autocomplete to work. If the user was to start with a postcode or street address, as most users would probably consider sensible, then the autocomplete would return no results. What I really need is something that works in a similar manner to the autocomplete plugins I've found so far, but that doesn't care about the order of the words typed into the search box. The only constraint should be that the strings being matched against contain all the words typed. For example, if an address is listed as "Mister Foobar, 123 Fake street, Quuxville, AS1 23D, then the autocomplete plugin would suggest that address if the user typed in "fake street as1", or "fake foobar". Are there any autocumplete plugins that support doing this?
