Question

I have a textbox on a form where I’m trying to detect the keys the user types in. The TextBox is multilined with wordwrap on. I don’t want the user the press the enter key (as I want all text entered on ONE line, wrapped) so I used the following code:

private void txtPlain_KeyPress(object sender, KeyPressEventArgs e) {
    if (e.KeyChar == (char)13) {
        MessageBox.Show("Enter keys are not allowed");
        e.KeyChar = (char)0;
    }
}

This worked fine in my tests, but when I tested for CTRL+ENTER it didn’t work as I’m not sure how to detect for the control key. From my googling I found that I need to use the KeyUp/Down events so I now have the following Code:

private void txtPlain_KeyUp(object sender, KeyEventArgs e) {
    //if (e.KeyData == (Keys.Control | Keys.Enter)) {

    if (e.KeyCode == Keys.Enter || (e.KeyCode == Keys.Enter && e.Control)) {            
        MessageBox.Show("Enter keys are not allowed:");
        //e.KeyValue = Keys.None;
    }
}

The first commented out line didn’t work for some reason so if anyone could explain why this would be useful.

The problem with the KeyUp/Down event is that I don’t know how to REMOVE the enter key from the text – unlike the KeyPress event when I can set the KeyChar to zero. The event captures both the Enter and Ctrl+Enter keys, but the cursor still goes to the next line in the TextBox.

Thanks for any help on this.

Answer 1

Hmm, there’s no reason to disallow the Enter key by handling the KeyDown or KeyUp events. You can simply set the AcceptsReturn property of the textbox control to False. This will prevent a multiline textbox from responding to a press of the Enter key.

Of course, this doesn’t solve the problem of Ctrl+Enter. In fact, that’s the expected way to create a new line when the AcceptsReturn property is set to False. To solve that, you will need to handle one of the keyboard events and prevent the control from receiving this input.

KeyDown is a good place to start. What you want to do is filter out any keyboard events that include the Keys.Enter flag. That will catch them no matter which other modifier key they might be combined with. Then, once you’ve found an Enter keypress, you want to set the e.Handled property to True in order to prevent it from being passed on to the control.

But unfortunately, we’re not quite done yet. The textbox control tries to handle certain keys internally, and you’re not going to be able to override that in a key event handler method. You also need to tell the control not to interpret that particular key as an input key. There are two primary ways of doing this. The first (and recommended way) is to inherit from the base TextBox class to create your own custom control, and then override the protected IsInputKey method. The second (somewhat simpler) way is just to handle the PreviewKeyDown event, and set the IsInputKey property to False.

Sample code:

private void txtPlain_PreviewKeyDown(object sender, PreviewKeyDownEventArgs e)
{
    // Check if the KeyCode value has the Keys.Enter flag set
    if ((e.KeyCode & Keys.Enter) == Keys.Enter)
    {
        // Set the IsInputKey property to False
        e.IsInputKey = false;
    }
}

private void txtPlain_KeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs e)
{
    // Check if the KeyCode value has the Keys.Enter flag set
    if ((e.KeyCode & Keys.Enter) == Keys.Enter)
    {            
        // Show the user a message
        MessageBox.Show("Enter keys are not allowed in this textbox.");

        // Prevent the key event from being passed on to the control
        e.Handled = true;
    }
}

And, though I assume this is for testing purposes only, you definitely want to take that MessageBox call out of there for production code. Find another way to alert the user that their input was not allowed, such as a short beep sound and an ErrorProvider component placed next to the textbox. Showing a message box is very jarring, and not very user-friendly. See my answer here for other hints and tips.