Autocomplete with mixed matching

This module provides an autocomplete widget for entity reference fields that combines "STARTS_WITH" and "CONTAINS" matching.
Other than that, the widget behaves exactly like the one from Drupal core.

The result has all the matches that start with the search string, followed by matches that only contain the search string but that don't start with it.

Features

Comparison with core entity autocomplete widget.

Use case

The main use case are reference fields with a large number of potential targets.
In these cases neither the "CONTAINS" nor the "STARTS_WITH" mode are completely suitable:

• For "STARTS_WITH", there may be no results, if all the items start with a prefix like "The ..." or a number.
• For "CONTAINS", the exact match may never show up, because the list is filled up with less relevant matches.

Post-Installation

Configure any entity form display, use the widget for an entity reference field.