How to create: Search Menu

Learn how to use JavaScript to create a search menu to filter links.

Create a search menu

Step 1 - Add HTML:

<input type="text" id="mySearch" onkeyup="myFunction()" placeholder="Search.." title="Type in a category">
<ul id="myMenu">
  <li><a href="#">HTML</a></li>
  <li><a href="#">CSS</a></li>
  <li><a href="#">JavaScript</a></li>
  <li><a href="#">PHP</a></li>
  <li><a href="#">Python</a></li>
  <li><a href="#">jQuery</a></li>
  <li><a href="#">SQL</a></li>
  <li><a href="#">Bootstrap</a></li>
  <li><a href="#">Node.js</a></li>
</ul>

Note:In this demonstration, we use href="#"because we do not have any linkable pages. In reality, this should be a real URL pointing to a specific page.

Step 2 - Add CSS:

Set the style of the search box and navigation menu:

/* Set the style of search box */
#mySearch {
  width: 100%;
  font-size: 18px;
  padding: 11px;
  border: 1px solid #ddd;
}
/* Set the style of navigation menu */
#myMenu {
  list-style-type: none;
  padding: 0;
  margin: 0;
}
/* Set the style of navigation links */
#myMenu li a {
  padding: 12px;
  text-decoration: none;
  color: black;
  display: block
}
#myMenu li a:hover {
  background-color: #eee;
}

Step 3 - Add JavaScript:

<script>
function myFunction() {
  // Declare variables
  var input, filter, ul, li, a, i;
  input = document.getElementById("mySearch");
  filter = input.value.toUpperCase();
  ul = document.getElementById("myMenu");
  li = ul.getElementsByTagName("li");
  // Loop through all list items and hide those that do not match the search query
  for (i = 0; i < li.length; i++) {
    a = li[i].getElementsByTagName("a")[0];
    if (a.innerHTML.toUpperCase().indexOf(filter) > -1) {
      li[i].style.display = "";
    } else {
      li[i].style.display = "none";
    }
  }
}
</script>

Try it yourself

Tip:If you want to perform a case-sensitive search, please remove toUpperCase().

Related pages

Tutorial:How to filter a table

Tutorial:How to Filter List