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
    Being a Dev Dad

    I get asked loads of questions every day but I'm always surprised that they're rarely questions about code or even tech -- many of the questions I get are more about non-dev stuff like what my office is like, what software I use, and oftentimes...

  • By
    Create a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Brilliant Sprited, CSS-Powered Firefox Animation

    Mozilla recently formally announced Firefox OS and its partners at Mobile World Congress and I couldn't be more excited.  Firefox OS is going to change the lives of people in developing countries, hopefully making a name for itself in the US as well.  The...

  • By
    CSS Vertical Centering

    Front-end developing is beautiful, and it's getting prettier by the day. Nowadays we got so many concepts, methodologies, good practices and whatnot to make our work stand out from the rest. Javascript (along with its countless third party libraries) and CSS have grown so big, helping...

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!