Question

I am trying to programmatically fire a key event to go left in a text box, but not having any luck.

The input element has focus and the cursor is at the end. I’m trying to get the cursor to move left one step – before the letter “F” *programmatically by firing a Keyboard event (keydown/keyup/keypress) with the corresponding keystroke ← or → targeted at the input box.

ABCDEF|

Here’s the code so far:

HTML

<input id="a" type="text" />

Javascript

var keyEvent = document.createEvent("KeyboardEvent");

var keyLocation = '0x00';
var keyIdentifier = "Left";

keyEvent.initKeyboardEvent("keypress",
                        true,
                        true,
                        window,
                        keyIdentifier,
                        keyLocation,
                        false);

$("a").dispatchEvent(keyEvent);

Saved a quick demo on jsfiddle if you want to see the whole code – http://jsfiddle.net/Vsafv/

I am not interested in making this cross-browser (just get it working in Chrome).

Answer 1

e = jQuery.Event("keydown"); // define this once in global scope
e.which = 37; // Some key value
$("input").trigger(e);

where “input” is your textarea

37 – left
38 – up
39 – right
40 – down

So when you record your “events” you record the values for the keys pressed.
I’m sure you already figured out a way to do this but just in case, here’s an idea of how i would tackle it:

var keysPressed = new Array(); // somewhere in the global scope
$("input").keydown(function (e) {
    keysPressed.push(e.which); //adding values to the end of array
});

Hope this helps