Insert code replaces all realname instances, including existing

I tried the whole "remember where the user was typing" idea, but it was a complete nightmare. As far as I could see there is no ckeditor function for this and trying to figure it out yourself is very difficult.

But you are right it's not necessarily the last occurence.

So instead, I'm thinking (aloud) that we could use the methods (A,B,C):

example:

typed = "@rudie"

A: look for "@rudie" without a link surrounding it
B: just replace "@rudie" with the whole name without "@" thus removing the problem for next insert.
C: replace any occurence of "@rudie" BUT use a character entity for "@" (@)

I would prefer A or B.
C seems a bit dirty and I'm not sure if it at all works or if it would cause other problems.

Right. Tricky stuff indeed. But [A] should cover 99% of all usecases I think. Except perhaps when an email adress starts with the same letters, but that seems like an edge case.

Anybody now how to enhance below regexp (js) to make it replace "only $typed when $typed is not already link (between a href tag)"?

...
  var regEx = new RegExp(typed, "ig"); // case insensitive replacement
  var replaced_text = body.replace(regEx, linkhtml);
...

The element you say, not position. But the element will be most likely a <p> and contain multiple mentions... So that won't be 100% foolproof. In fact when I would just start typing and mention the same name twice in a row (without enter) it would fail.

I agree regex is not the best solution but I wonder if a slightly different approach might be easier/better:

When typing an "@", we could maybe put this character between a temporary span as a marker. For example: <span>@</span>.

Then, when inserting, we swap the span out. But it will be easy to locate the string because it will always be something like "<span>@</span>rudie". Or am I overlooking something?

Of course, on cancel/stop observing, the span should be swapped out too.

Thanks! Will test it asap.

The replacing seems to work well indeed, solving this issues problem. However, the patch needs some work:

• backspace throws js error
• does not stop watching after # number of chars

Also I think the menu callback needs to have:

    'delivery callback' => 'drupal_json_output',

Fixed and comitted to dev!

I fixed above issues and also added a check to see if the view has results. If none, the html is not appended (else an empty container might appear).

This resulted however, in a bug with IE9/10 (didn't test it with IE8) which now makes inserting multiple mentions in IE impossible:

#2033739: IE9+ replacement problems when inserting existing strings