Question

I am trying to “feature detect” IE’s behavior when pressing enter in an input box that has a button element next to it (when they are not in a form element).

I’m saying IE’s behavior because no one else fires a click event on the next button when pressing the enter-key while the input is focused.

Related question where the first awnser describes why IE behaves like this:
IE bug triggers click for 2 buttons?

JS-Fiddle where I try to simulate the key press via jQuery.Event and .trigger:
http://jsfiddle.net/DbVrn/

Behavior of said js-fiddle in IE:

• When opening the page, the input gets focus, and then we try to simulate pressing of the enter-key.
• The simulated enter-key does nothing, hence the input remains focused and red.
• If you manually press enter while the input is focused, the button will become focused and green.

The problem i have with my current attempt to detect this feature is that:

$("input").trigger(jQuery.Event("keypress", { which: 13 }));

does not actually do the same as manually pressing the enter-key while the input is focused.

How can I successfully simulate the enter-key so that my test for this behavior is possible?
Or is there another way i can test for this behavior?

Edit: Updated title to more clearly state that this needs to be tested via javascript, and that the test needs to work in IE from version 8 to 10. Unless anyone else can provide a way of testing this, I will conclude that I need to use user-agent sniffing to see if browser is IE and choose code-path based off that.

Answer 1

It seems there is no way to test for this behavior via JavaScript.
I have tested IE 8, 9 and 10 and confirmed they all behave this way.

So for now, i am going to combine some ideas from
Javascript IE detection, why not use simple conditional comments? and
http://tanalin.com/en/articles/ie-version-js/ to create a test for IE that will work reliably as long as IE does not remove support for conditional compilation comments.

var ie = (/*@cc_on!@*/false && (function(){
    var div = document.createElement("div"),
        list = div.getElementsByTagName("br"),
        version = 3;
    do {
        div.innerHTML = "<!--[if gt IE " + (++version) + "]><br><![endif]-->";
    } while(list[0]);
    return (version > 4 ? version : 10);
}()));

The ie variable will be the browser version in Internet Explorer, and will be false in other browsers.