Building a quick search box with JQuery

I have the following markup:

<input type="text" id="comboBox" />
<ul id="comboBoxData">
    <li>1</li>
    <li>12</li>
    <li>123</li>
    <li>1234</li>
    <li>12345</li>
    <li>123456</li>
    <li>1234567</li>
    <li>12345678</li>
</ul>

with the following JQuery code:

$(document).ready(function() {   
    $('#comboBox').bind('keydown keypress keyup change', function () {
        var search = $('#comboBox').val();
        if (search !== '') {
            $('#comboBoxData li').hide();
            $('#comboBoxData li[text*=' + search + ']').show();
        } else {
            $('#comboBoxData li').show();
        }
    });
});

when I type text like '1' or '12' in the 'comboBox' search field it is supposed to filter out all the LI's whose text doesn't contain my search data however for some reason it is displaying nothing instead. Why?

your example does not work because text is not an attribute of an li.

Try using filter() to search for the text instead:

$('#comboBox').bind('keydown keypress keyup change', function() {
    var search = this.value;
    var $li = $("#comboBoxData li").hide();
    $li.filter(function() {
        return $(this).text().indexOf(search) >= 0;
    }).show();
});

Example fiddle