jquery - Auto-scaling input[type=text] to width of value?

Question

Is there a way to scale the width of an <input type="text"> to the width of the actual value?

input {
  display: block;
  margin: 20px;
  width: auto;
}

<input type="text" value="I've had enough of these damn snakes, on this damn plane!" />

<input type="text" value="me too" />

Answer 1

You can do this the easy way by setting the size attribute to the length of the input contents:

function resizeInput() {
    $(this).attr('size', $(this).val().length);
}

$('input[type="text"]')
    // event handler
    .keyup(resizeInput)
    // resize on page load
    .each(resizeInput);

See: http://jsfiddle.net/nrabinowitz/NvynC/

This seems to add some padding on the right that I suspect is browser dependent. If you wanted it to be really tight to the input, you could use a technique like the one I describe in this related answer, using jQuery to calculate the pixel size of your text.