Question

I have a webpage where users should be able to type anywhere and have their input tracked. One problem is that the slash key, “/,” in firefox is a shortcut for opening the search. This is undesirable for me. I have not found a way to trap the search functionality and still add the input to my tracking. I add the input to the stack on keypress.

keydown…preventDefault works best in FireFox, but the problem is that in Chrome, keypress does not fire for some reason (not sure why preventDefault would stop that, but it does). This would be okay if I could add the slash on my own to the input stack..but Firefox is already adding it because keypress is still triggered. stopPropagation does not prevent keypress from triggering in FireFox either. $(document).keypress(e) in the keydown method also does nothing.

Another issue I have is that “backspace” is supposed to remove from the stack, but I add to the stack with String.fromCharCode(e.which) and add the data to an input type="text" field that the user can see. In Chrome this works perfectly, but in FireFox, it adds a character representing the backspace and then immediately removes it, preventing another character from being removed. Having “backspace” and “f5,” etc. characters in the input is also undesirable. Is there a way to tell if the fromCharCode value is valid for a text field? I think what’s happening is that Chrome just does that automatically.

EDIT: This may help, but FireFox apparently triggers keypress before keydown (Chrome does the opposite) on my webpage. This is unusual.

Answer 1

Solved this with a bit of a kludge. I have a noslash variable that triggers capturing the slash:

else if (e.which == '191' && !noslash) {
   e.preventDefault();
   $typing.val($typing.val() + '/');
}

As for the second part of the question, I simply reject any character in

[^-a-z0-9`~!@#$%^&*()_+=\\|/'";:,<.>?\[\]{}]