Question

On the website I’m developing, I have a search box with which I would like to incorporate a live autosuggest feature. (If you know a better way than the route I’m going please let me know)

Here’s what I have in mind:
As the user types in the search bar, when the onchange event is triggered I want to send the query to the server (via ajax or websockets), then build a regex from the query (/^SOMELETTERS/gi), then search multiple fields (product names, brands, product numbers…) and match them to the regex. I want to gather the top 10 results and send them to the client side in json format to be used in an autosuggest script that’s kind of like what google has.

These are my questions:
(1) Is there a better way?
(2) If no, how would I build a regex that matches items that begin with whatever the query is? …I mean, what would the syntax be? I’ve tried a lot of things but they don’t seem to work.

Answer 1

Call the constructor of the RegExp object. MSDN Docs.

If you have req.params.q you can:

var rx = new Regex(req.params.q);