Question

I have an <input> which has an onkeydown inline event handler. In this handler, I’d like to call a function and pass a special parameter to it – the event data.

When I want to handle events (e.g. onmousemove) for the whole document, I use the following code:

document.onmousemove=function(e) {
// here I can make a good use of the 'e' variable,
// for example extract the mouse coordinates from it
}

And it works (although I don’t know where the e variable – event data – comes from).
But this time I want to use the function only for the <input> mentioned above.
I need to pass the event data to the function so it can get the pressed key’s code. And I want to do it in that inline event handler. I’ve created a function:

function myfunc (e) {
    var evt=window.event?event:e;
    var code=evt.keyCode;
    alert (code);
}

and tried all of these methods:

<input onkeydown="myfunc(this)">

<input onkeydown="myfunc(this.onkeydown)">

<input onkeydown="myfunc(onkeydown)">

But none of them worked, the alert window kept displaying “undefined”.
I looked for a solution to my problem in Google, but didn’t find anything that could help me solve it.

Answer 1

<input onkeydown="myfunc(event)">

function myfunc (e) {
    e = e || window.event;
    var code = e.keyCode;
    alert (code);
}