onInput Event

By  on  

Coding HTML forms has been painful my entire career. Form controls look different between operating systems and browsers, coding client side and server side validation is a nightmare, and inevitably you forget something somewhere along the line. Some behaviors don't act the way you'd hope, like onChange, which only fires when the user leaves (blurs) a given form controls. Enter the onInputevent, which changes upon keystroke, paste, etc.

// Try it here:  https://codepen.io/darkwing/pen/KKmBNvg
myInput.addEventListener('input', e => {
  console.log(e.target.value);
});

These days it seems like the old onChange behavior isn't useful -- we always want to react to any user input. onInput also fires on elements with contenteditable and designmode attributes. Most modern JavaScript libraries like React treat onChange like onInput, so it's as though onChange has lost its use!

Recent Features

  • By
    Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations

    Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’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
    CSS Selection Styling

    The goal of CSS is to allow styling of content and structure within a web page.  We all know that, right?  As CSS revisions arrive, we're provided more opportunity to control.  One of the little known styling option available within the browser is text selection styling.

  • By
    Font Replacement Using Cufón

    We all know about the big font replacement methods. sIFR's big. Image font replacement has gained some steam. Not too many people know about a great project named Cufón though. Cufón uses a unique blend of a proprietary font generator tool...

Discussion

  1. Thomas

    I agree that onInput is very handy, but I beg to differ on the point that there is no more use for onChange. E.g. in this tutorial for creating a custom audio player: https://css-tricks.com/lets-create-a-custom-audio-player/#play-pause There, the onChange event is used for a range input element to seek to a passage in an audio file. While playing the audio, you might not want the current position in the audio to change on every input, but only after having finished seeking the correct passage.

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