How to Prevent Pasting into an Input

By  on  

Every once in a while I get to a website that doesn't allow me to paste into a form input. In most cases it's something to do with login credentials (username and or password) and auth codes. So how are they preventing me from pasting information? It's as easy as you'd think!

Let's start with the input element:

<input type="text" onpaste="return false;" ondrop="return false;" autocomplete="off" />

The onpaste attribute lets us prevent pasting into the form. Adding the autocomplete attribute as well as preventing drag and drop into the element. If you want to avoid the on{event} code in the HTML, you can do it the cleaner way:

myElement.addEventListener('paste', e => e.preventDefault());

Writing this post pains me because I loathe when websites prevent me from pasting text. I'm begging you not to do this. Just don't.

Recent Features

  • By
    5 More HTML5 APIs You Didn&#8217;t Know Existed

    The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs.  Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers.  Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a...

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn&#8217;t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create Custom Events in MooTools 1.2

    Javascript has a number of native events like "mouseover," "mouseout", "click", and so on. What if you want to create your own events though? Creating events using MooTools is as easy as it gets. The MooTools JavaScript What's great about creating custom events in MooTools is...

  • By
    Use Elements as Background Images with -moz-element

    We all know that each browser vendor takes the liberty of implementing their own CSS and JavaScript features, and I'm thankful for that. Mozilla and WebKit have come out with some interesting proprietary CSS properties, and since we all know that cementing standards...

Discussion

  1. mwait

    So am I able to edit the locally stored js file to re-enable pasting until I reload the page?

  2. Thanks a lot for sharing this. It was really needed as I don’t like to write passwords and username again and again.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!