javascript - jQuery autocomplete detect empty input

Question

I am using jQuery autocomplete and am running into an issue where it is not detecting it is empty.

$("#autocomplete").on("autocompleteopen", function() {
    if (!$(this).val()) {
      console.log("I am empty");
    } else {
      console.log("I am not empty");
    }

The input starts out as empty, and if I type the letter t I see I am not empty printed to the console. If I remove the t from the input I see nothing printed to the console.

If I type test and backspace the last t I see I am not empty. So it is not a problem with the autocompleteopen event listener. Any ideas what could be going on?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65909239/jquery-autocomplete-detect-empty-input

Answer 1

For all you future Googlers, the issue was within my autocomplete object. In order to detect a length of zero, you have to set the minLength attribute to zero. See example below.

$("#autocomplete").autocomplete({
    minLength: 0,
    ...
})

https://api.jqueryui.com/autocomplete/#option-minLength