A fun blog post popped up yesterday in which John Nunemaker ported a Quicksilver-style Live Search to jQuery. Taking a look at his code, I decided to have a little fun and re-port it to jQuery – trying to use the functional style that jQuery promotes. I think the end result is quite simple and elegant.

The final code – compare with John’s port:

jQuery.fn.liveUpdate = function(list){ list = jQuery(list); if ( list.length ) { var rows = list.children('li'), cache = rows.map(function(){ return this.innerHTML.toLowerCase(); }); this .keyup(filter).keyup() .parents('form').submit(function(){ return false; }); } return this; function filter(){ var term = jQuery.trim( jQuery(this).val().toLowerCase() ), scores = []; if ( !term ) { rows.show(); } else { rows.hide(); cache.each(function(i){ var score = this.score(term); if (score > 0) { scores.push([score, i]); } }); jQuery.each(scores.sort(function(a, b){return b[0] - a[0];}), function(){ jQuery(rows[ this[1] ]).show(); }); } } };

A couple points to note: