Sort typeahead suggestions with the exact input at top

Question

I am using Twitter typeahead.js 0.10.5 as a suggestion engine. It works great, with one exception, I can\'t sort the list of suggestions the way I want.

As an example:

Answer 1

To sort all matches by closeness to the input, you can take the Levenshtein distance of a and b. I just implemented this using fast-levenshtein and it works and performs great.

        sorter: function(a, b) {
            var input_string = $(selector).val();
            return levenshtein.get(a.key, input_string) - levenshtein.get(b.key, input_string);
        }

Answer 2

You want something along these lines. This will move the exact match to the top. You will want to continue modifying the sorter code to handle string case, whitespace, and how you want non perfect but close matches to be handled.This should get you started.

        var suggestion = new Bloodhound({
            datumTokenizer: Bloodhound.tokenizers.obj.whitespace('value'),
            queryTokenizer: Bloodhound.tokenizers.whitespace,
            local: data,
            limit: 20,
            sorter:function(a, b) { 

                     //get input text
                 var InputString=   $(Selector).val();

                     //move exact matches to top
                 if(InputString==a.value){ return -1;}
                 if(InputString==b.value){return 1;}

                      //close match without case matching
                 if(InputString.toLowerCase() ==a.value.toLowerCase()){ return -1;}
                 if(InputString.toLowerCase()==b.value.toLowerCase()){return 1;} 

                 if( (InputString!=a.value) && (InputString!=b.value)){

                      if (a.value < b.value) {
                         return -1;
                      }
                      else if (a.value > b.value) {
                         return 1;
                      }
                      else return 0;
                 }
              },
          });