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Full width, Responsive Search Box using CSS Tricks

| CSS

Search boxes are a common need, but creating them can be trickier than expected. The below is a full width responsive search box using a few CSS tricks. Here’s the running example:

demo:

download demo

Here’s a summary:

<style>
    /*import font awesome css icon library*/

    @import url("https://netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.2.0/css/font-awesome.css");
    input,
    select,
    textarea {
        background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #fafafa;
        border: 1px solid #eeeeee;
        color: #5e5e5e;
        display: block;
        font-family: arial, sans-serif;
        font-size: inherit;
        padding: 10px;
        width: 100%;
        box-sizing: border-box;
        font-size: 16px;
        margin: 0;
        height: 40px;
    }

    #searchtext {
        overflow: hidden;
    }

    a.search-submit-button {
        background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #fafafa;
        border-bottom: 1px solid #eeeeee;
        border-right: 1px solid #eeeeee;
        border-top: 1px solid #eeeeee;
        color: #5e5e5e !important;
        display: block;
        float: right;
        font-family: inherit;
        font-size: 20px;
        padding: 8px 10px;
        text-align: center;
        width: 45px;
        box-sizing: border-box;
        height: 40px;
    }

    #form-container {
        /* width: 60%; */
    }
</style>

<div>
    <div id="form-container">
        <!--<input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="" />--> 
        <div id="searchtext"><input id="s" name="s" type="text" value="Search Something..." /></div>
    </div>
</div>

A little explanation…

  • both elements have box-sizing: border-box (Without this there may be alignment issues)
  • input has margin: 0 (To remove browser default margin on inputs)
  • both have a height assigned (Without this some browsers will align them differently)
  • the anchor is placed before the "searchtext" div and a float: right is applied to the anchor to make the arrangement possible and still allow the input to stretch 100% to it's container
  • Font Awesome used as a search icon instead of images for flexibility

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