Question

I’m trying to set up an autocomplete with category titles, boldface matching strings and label descriptions.

Here’s an example of autocomplete with category titles and boldfaced matching strings in the suggestions
http://jsfiddle.net/rjtJj/4/

Here’s an example of autocomplete with label descriptions
http://jsfiddle.net/rjtJj/6/

Is there anyway I can combine the 3?

Answer 1

append the description after the label in your monkeypathautocomplete function..

function monkeyPatchAutocomplete() {
            // Don't really need to save the old fn, 
            // but I could chain if I wanted to
            var oldFn = $.ui.autocomplete.prototype._renderItem;

            $.ui.autocomplete.prototype._renderItem = function (ul, item) {
            item.label = item.label.replace(new RegExp("(?![^&;]+;)(?!<[^<>]*)(" + $.ui.autocomplete.escapeRegex(this.term) +
                ")(?![^<>]*>)(?![^&;]+;)", "gi"), "<strong>$1</strong>");
            return $("<li></li>")
                .data("item.autocomplete", item)
                .append("<a>" + item.label + "</a><br><a><i>" + item.desc + "</i></a>")
                .appendTo(ul);
            };
        }

There is an excellent library to deal with these kind of situations if you are interested:
http://harvesthq.github.com/chosen/