Submitting a form by pressing enter without a submit button

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Well I am trying to submit a form by pressing enter but not displaying a submit button. I don't want to get into JavaScript if possible since I want everything to work on all browsers (the only JS way I know is with events).

Right now the form looks like this:

<form name="loginBox" target="#here" method="post">
    <input name="username" type="text" /><br />
    <input name="password" type="password" />
    <input type="submit" style="height: 0px; width: 0px; border: none; padding: 0px;" hidefocus="true" />
</form>

Which works pretty well. The submit button works when the user presses enter, and the button doesn't show in Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera and Chrome. However, I still don't like the solution since it is hard to know whether it will work on all platforms with all browsers.

Can anyone suggest a better method? Or is this about as good as it gets?

submit forms html
20 Answers

Update 2022: Use this instead

<input type="submit" hidden />
Notice - Outdated answer
Please do not use position: absolute in the year 2021+. It's recommended to use the hidden attribute instead. Otherwise, look down below and pick a better, more modern, answer.

Try:

<input type="submit" style="position: absolute; left: -9999px"/>

That will push the button waaay to the left, out of the screen. The nice thing with this is, you'd get graceful degradation when CSS is disabled.

Update - Workaround for IE7

As suggested by Bryan Downing + with tabindex to prevent tab reach this button (by Ates Goral):

<input type="submit" 
       style="position: absolute; left: -9999px; width: 1px; height: 1px;"
       tabindex="-1" />
Ates_Goral_235010

I think you should go the Javascript route, or at least I would:

<script type="text/javascript">
// Using jQuery.

$(function() {
    $('form').each(function() {
        $(this).find('input').keypress(function(e) {
            // Enter pressed?
            if(e.which == 10 || e.which == 13) {
                this.form.submit();
            }
        });

        $(this).find('input[type=submit]').hide();
    });
});
</script>


<form name="loginBox" target="#here" method="post">
    <input name="username" type="text" /><br />
    <input name="password" type="password" />
    <input type="submit" />
</form>
user_399920

Have you tried this ?

<input type="submit" style="visibility: hidden;" />

Since most browsers understand visibility:hidden and it doesn't really work like display:none, I'm guessing that it should be fine, though. Haven't really tested it myself, so CMIIW.

andyk_267210

Instead of the hack you currently use to hide the button, it would be much simpler to set visibility: collapse; in the style attribute. However, I would still recommend using a bit of simple Javascript to submit the form. As far as I understand, support for such things is ubiquitous nowadays.

user_443890

HTML5 solution

<input type="submit" hidden />
user_46719320

I work with a bunch of UI frameworks. Many of them have a built-in class you can use to visually hide things.

Bootstrap

<input type="submit" class="sr-only" tabindex="-1">

Angular Material

<input type="submit" class="cdk-visually-hidden" tabindex="-1">

Brilliant minds who created these frameworks have defined these styles as follows:

.sr-only {
    position: absolute;
    width: 1px;
    height: 1px;
    padding: 0;
    overflow: hidden;
    clip: rect(0, 0, 0, 0);
    white-space: nowrap;
    border: 0;
}

.cdk-visually-hidden {
    border: 0;
    clip: rect(0 0 0 0);
    height: 1px;
    margin: -1px;
    overflow: hidden;
    padding: 0;
    position: absolute;
    width: 1px;
    outline: 0;
    -webkit-appearance: none;
    -moz-appearance: none;
}
user_2130500 
input.on('keypress', function(event) {
    if ( event.which === 13 ) {
        form.submit();
        return false;
    }
});
user_91943910

You could try also this

<INPUT TYPE="image" SRC="0piximage.gif" HEIGHT="0" WIDTH="0" BORDER="0">

You could include an image with width/height = 0 px

waney_581230

Here is the code that worked to me sure it will help you

<form name="loginBox" target="#here" method="post">
  <input name="username" type="text" /><br />
  <input name="password" type="password" />
  <input type="submit" />
</form>

<script type="text/javascript">
  $(function () {
    $("form").each(function () {
      $(this)
        .find("input")
        .keypress(function (e) {
          if (e.which == 10 || e.which == 13) {
            this.form.submit();
          }
        });
      $(this).find("input[type=submit]").hide();
    });
  });
</script>
user_142158200
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