Javascript: different keyCodes on different browsers?

user_266763 0
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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.

keycode javascript
5 Answers

Have also a look at this GitHub file: https://github.com/bpeacock/key-to-charCode/blob/master/jQuery.getChar.js on how you can use keyDown instead of keyPress events.

I used this for a barcode scanner with a keyboard wedge, on a mobile device, that had a bug on returning (keyPress) data for scanning a hyphen. Works pretty good. Except when I tested the app in a browser with a regular keyboard, I noticed that the hyphen works on Chrome, but not on Firefox. Strange but true. Fixed by adding code 173 in the above JS file, in addition to code 189.

This makes me wonder what the keyboard is actually sending. The keydown code of 173 or 189 for pressing the hyphen key (- _) is apparently not sent by the keyboard itself, but created by the browser that sends the keyDown event to my javascript application.

user_18456720
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