JQuery Autocomplete - multiple terms?

[dalecosp]

DanInMA suggested I start a new thread

I've got a fine looking search box with a JQuery autocomplete that looks impressive at first glance.

I'm trying to make it work for multiple terms --- "foobar" works fine, but the script stops matching and suggesting (in the browser) after a space, so "foobar baz" won't be matched. Watching in Firebug, I see the serviceURL is still providing matching data, so I'm pretty sure the problem is located somewhere on the Javascript side. I've spent more time than I should reading similar threads in places like StackOverflow and have a thread over at PHPBuilder as well, but the last advice there was that I should use PHP's json_encode() ... and that's not the point ... AAMOF it's not been working with json_encode.

Anyway, here's the stuff:

In the HTML header of the search page:

<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="includes/jquery.autocomplete.js"></script>

I've attached the latter *js file.

In the page itself:

<script type="text/javascript">
    var a = $('#searchbox').autocomplete({
    serviceUrl:'autocomplete.php',
    minChars:3,
    multiple: true,
    multipleSeparator: " ",
    delimiter: /(,|;)\s*/, // regex or character
    maxHeight:400,
    width:300,
    zIndex: 9999,
    deferRequestBy: 0, //miliseconds
    noCache: false //default is false, set to true to disable caching
    //callback function:
    // local autosugest options:
    //local lookup values
});
</script>

Here's Autocomplete.php:

<?php

// autocomplete.php --- feeds suggestions to
// the AJAX autocomplete (Java)script on our searchbox.

/* According to the docs for the JQuery plugin, we must
   echo the output EXACTLY as shown (a modified JSON).
   Third list ("data") is optional.
{
 query:'Li',
 suggestions:['Liberia','Libyan Arab Jamahiriya','Liechtenstein','Lithuania'],
 data:['LR','LY','LI','LT']
}
*/

// connect to the DB
include "includes/functions/db.func.php";
$connect=dbConn();
if (!$connect) die("DB connection failed");

if(isset($_GET['query']) && $_GET['query'] != '') {
   $jsonout=array();
   $qr=($_GET['query']);
   $qr=urlencode(mysql_escape_string($qr));
   $dbquery="select title from our_table where live=1 and title like '%$qr%' limit 15";
   $result = mysql_query($dbquery);
   if (!$result) exit;
   $replacer=array("\n","\r\n","<br>","<br />","<BR>");
   while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($result)) {
      $jsonout[] = str_replace($replacer," ",urldecode($row[0]));
   }
   
   // return the array as json with PHP
   echo "{
    query:'".$qr."',
    suggestions:[";
   
   $counter=1; $count=count($jsonout);
   foreach ($jsonout as $jj) {
      echo "'".$jj."'";
      if ($counter<$count) {
         echo ",";
      }
      $counter++;
   }
   echo "]
   }
   ";
}
// logging routine omitted
?>

Thanks very much, in advance, for any hints or clue-stick clobbers.