Detecting jQuery UI autocomplete

Question

How can I detect whether or not an input box is currently a jQuery UI autocomplete? There doesn't seem to be a native method for this, but I'm hoping there is something simple like this:

if ($("#q").autocomplete)
{
  //Do something
}

That conditional, however, seems to always return true.

Answer 1

if ($("#q").hasClass("ac_input")) {
    // do something
}

UPDATE

The class name in the JQuery UI autocomplete widget is now 'ui-autocomplete-input' so that code would be:

if ($("#q").hasClass("ui-autocomplete-input")) {
    // do something
}

Answer 2

You can also find the autocomplete behavior attached to an input element by following line of code:

if ($('Selector').data('autocomplete')) {
}

Answer 3

If the autocomplete jquery UI plugin is already included for the page and you just want to check to see if a particular (input) element has been setup with autocomplete function, you can use the official API method as shown below:

if ($("#q").autocomplete("instance")) {
    console.log("autocomplete already setup for #q");
} else {
    console.log("NO autocomplete for #q");
}

More details can be found at http://api.jqueryui.com/autocomplete/#method-instance