Damn You, Autocorrect!

After the seventh time I shouted “stop autocorrecting cmb2 fields!” at my site, I knew I had to do something.

When you run a website where you enter a lot of people’s names, Autocorrect is a curse more than a blessing. Of course I want it on my post content, but when I get to the field where I enter someone’s name, for crying out loud, some names like Nuñez just don’t meet a spell check. And don’t get me started on my friend’s names or my own. I’ve lost track of the number of times I ended up as “Mike.”

This issue used to only be on phones and tablets. Then Apple introduced autocorrect to their MacOS, which resulted in a lot of tweets followed up by “Damn you, Autocorrect!”

HTML Attributes

If you’ve got a form and you want to tell autocorrect to go away, the code looks like this:

<input autocomplete="off" autocorrect="off" autocapitalize="off" spellcheck="false" />

For the most part, this will work. You don’t need all of them all of the time, but in my case I was adding names and “Debbie van Houten” was one problem and “Dr. el Farad” was another. I wanted it to just shut up and let me type the name as their parents intended, no matter what. I went whole hog.

But as I mentioned, I use CMB2 and I needed to stop my site from autocorrecting CMB2 fields. It was time for some code.

CMB2 Custom HTML Attributes

This one is so straightforward I was delighted. When you create a new field, you can set arbitrary attributes.

// Field: Actor Name
$cmb_characters->add_field( array(
	'name'				=> 'Actor Name',
	'desc'				=> 'Include years (in parens) for multiple actors',
	'id'				=> $prefix . 'actor',
	'type'				=> 'text',
	'repeatable'		=> 'true',
	'attributes'		=> array(
		'autocomplete'		=> 'off',
		'autocorrect'		=> 'off',
		'autocapitalize'	=> 'off',
		'spellcheck'		=> 'false',
	),
) );

That was all I needed to do in order to get autocorrect to duck itself. Now I was free to write however weird a name I needed without worrying that autocorrect wanted to call me Mike. Again.

Thanks, autocorrect. Thanks a lot.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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