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
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

  • By
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create Twitter-Style Buttons with the Dojo Toolkit

    I love that JavaScript toolkits make enhancing web pages incredibly easy. Today I'll cover an effect that I've already coded with MooTools: creating a Twitter-style animated "Sign In" button. Check out this five minute tutorial so you can take your static...

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos

    The <canvas> element has been a revelation for the visual experts among our ranks.  Canvas provides the means for incredible and efficient animations with the added bonus of no Flash; these developers can flash their awesome JavaScript skills instead.  Here are nine unbelievable canvas demos that...

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!