Javascript: different keyCodes on different browsers?

Question

So I've seen some forums posts about different browsers reporting differenct keyCodes, but everyone seems so avoid the "why?".

I was trying to capture the colon (:) keyCode and realized that Firefox reports back e.keyCode 56. While Chrome reports back 186 (I think that's what it was).

Is there a univeral way of getting the right keyCode across all browsers?

And why are they different if they are the same keys?

I would be more curious as to whether there is a international way of getting the same key press.

Thanks.

Answer 1

It depends whether you're interested in which physical key the user has pressed or which character the user has typed. If it's the character you're after, you can get that reliably in all major browsers (using the keypress event's which property in most browsers or keyCode in IE <= 8), but only in the keypress event. If you're after the key, use the keydown or keyup event and examine the keyCode property, although the exact key-code mappings do differ somewhat between browsers.

An excellent explanation of and reference for all JavaScript key-related events can be found at http://unixpapa.com/js/key.html.

To detect the user typing a colon character reliably in all the major browsers, you could do the following:

document.onkeypress = function(e) {
    e = e || window.event;
    var charCode = (typeof e.which == "number") ? e.which : e.keyCode;
    if (charCode && String.fromCharCode(charCode) == ":") {
        alert("Colon!");
    }
};

Answer 2

See http://unixpapa.com/js/key.html for an explanation why they have different keys. I do not know of an international way to match keys.