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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T09:23:45+00:00

I have an html form with a lot of text fields that all take

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I have an html form with a lot of text fields that all take only one character (think crossword puzzle). When a letter is entered in an input field, I use jQuery to jump to the next one. This works fine, except for the Swedish characters åäö (other international characters are probably affected too).

I bind an event listener to the keyup event, and use the event.keyCode and event.which to determine if the pressed key was a letter (if it was any special key, the events passes untouched).

The problem is that when I press å, ä or ö, both event.keyCode and event.which are 0. When I examine the event object in Firebug, I can’t find any attribute that seems to hold the key code.

The code looks like this:

    var crossword = $('article.crossword');

    crossword.bind('keyup', function(event) {
        var target = $(event.target, crossword);

        if (target.hasClass('crossword_letter_input')) {
            var pressedKey = event.which ? event.which : event.keyCode;
            var target_value = target.val();
            var target_tabindex;

            // Regular alphanumeric keys have keyCodes between 48 and 90.
            if (pressedKey >= 48 && pressedKey <= 90 && target_value.length) {
                target_tabindex = parseInt(target.attr('tabindex'));
                $('input.crossword_letter_input[tabindex=' + (target_tabindex + 1) + ']', crossword).focus();
            }
        }
    });

I use the keyup event in order to move focus after the character has been entered into the text field.

If you know of any jQuery plugin or vanilla JS that could replace this completely, that would also be a solution.

EDIT: I have made a temporary (and ugly) fix by inserting the following else if:

    // å, ä and ö reports keyCode 0 for some reason.
    else if (pressedKey === 0 && target_value.length) {
        target_tabindex = parseInt(target.attr('tabindex'));
        $('input.crossword_letter_input[tabindex=' + (target_tabindex + 1) + ']', crossword).focus();
    }

This way, I simply suppose that if the event.which and event.keyCode was both 0, and the length of the value in the field is greater than 0, focus should be moved to the next input. Supposing stuff without knowing doesn’t feel great though…

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Keycode is 0 for the right alt on keyboard. When you type a letter that requires use of this alt key you get 0 from ket code. There are other keys that also give the code == 0 (eg. the windows key on FF on linux)

    This code (taken from jquery example and changed a bit) produces what should be enough:

    <!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script>
</head>
<body>

<input id="whichkey" value="type something">
<div id="log"></div>
<script>$('#whichkey').bind('keypress',function(e){ 
  $('#log').html(e.type + ': ' +  e.which );
});  </script>

</body></html>

    when you type it gets triggered for alt+letter twice – once with which==0, next with which==correct code for the letter.

    eg.

    Where I live alt+a produces ą and goes the right code in an event after the one with 0.
    Keydown was only sent once with the 0 code in the same situation.

    codes:

    alt==0
a==97
ą=261
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