Question

How can I cancel the keydown of a specific key on the keyboard, for example(space, enter and arrows) in an HTML page.

Answer 1

If you’re only interested in the example keys you mentioned, the keydown event will do, except for older, pre-Blink versions of Opera (up to and including version 12, at least) where you’ll need to cancel the keypress event. It’s much easier to reliably identify non-printable keys in the keydown event than the keypress event, so the following uses a variable to set in the keydown handler to tell the keypress handler whether or not to suppress the default behaviour.

Example code using addEventListener and ignoring ancient version of Opera

document.addEventListener("keydown", function(evt) {
    // These days, you might want to use evt.key instead of keyCode
    if (/^(13|32|37|38|39|40)$/.test("" + evt.keyCode)) {
        evt.preventDefault();
    }
}, false);

Original example code from 2010

var cancelKeypress = false;

document.onkeydown = function(evt) {
    evt = evt || window.event;
    cancelKeypress = /^(13|32|37|38|39|40)$/.test("" + evt.keyCode);
    if (cancelKeypress) {
        return false;
    }
};

/* For pre-Blink Opera */
document.onkeypress = function(evt) {
    if (cancelKeypress) {
        return false;
    }
};