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
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

  • By
    9 More Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    With Firefox OS, asm.js, and the push for browser performance improvements, canvas and WebGL technologies are opening a world of possibilities.  I featured 9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos and then took it up a level with 9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos, but I want to outdo...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Get Slick with MooTools Kwicks

    When I first saw MooTools graphical navigation, I was impressed. I thought it was a very simple yet creative way of using Flash. When I right-clicked and saw that it was JavaScript, I was floored. How could they achieve such...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools Dotter

    It's best practice to provide an indicator of some sort when performing an AJAX request or processing that takes place in the background. Since the dawn of AJAX, we've been using colorful spinners and imagery as indicators. While I enjoy those images, I am...

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!