Showing Android's soft keyboard when a field is .focus()'d using javascript

In a web-page I've got a search field. I've added a "clear" button so that users can clear the search field and start again. As a convenience, I focus the search field's text box and the cursor does appear in the box. However the soft k开发者_StackOverflow社区eyboard does not seem to show up on android devices that use the default browser. In iOS and Opera Mobile it works as I'd expect.

Is there an additional method I can call that will cause the keyboard to show on Android's browser so the user can start typing right away?

function clear_search() {
    if($('#searchinput').val()) {
        $('#searchinput').val('');
    }
    $('#searchinput').focus();
}

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this question is similar to How to focus an input field on Android browser through javascript or jquery

Anyway, as you already have a click event to work with, this should sort you out:

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('#field').click(function(e){ $(this).focus(); });

    $('#button').click(function(e) {
        $('#field').trigger('click');
    });
})     

Of course you DO need a click event triggering this. Just focussing without an event doesnt seem to work. The above works for me on the standard browser on android 4 and shows the soft keyboard.

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click() on its own is not enough. You need to focus() then click(). Beware of endless loops if your script is triggered by an onclick() on a containing element. The script below is working for me on Chrome for android 58 and Safari mobile 602.1.

var target = document.getElementsByTagName("input")[0];

if (event.target != target) {
    target.focus();
    target.click();
}

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I am not 100% sure but I think it can`t be done (at least until android 2.2) from javascript. If you are using phonegap you can use this here: https://github.com/phonegap/phonegap/wiki/How-to-show-and-hide-soft-keyboard-in-Android