Question

i have attached this function to the key pressed event with jquery but in the eventObject it returns the same char code for capitals and lower case characters entered

function keyPressed(delegates,eventdata){
        var keyType = new KeyType();
        var keycode = eventdata.which;
        if((keycode === 0)&&(eventdata.keyCode === 46)){
            keycode=46;
        }
        switch(keycode)
        {
        case keyType.enter:
            break;
        case keyType.backspace:
            break;
        case keyType.del:
            break;
        case keyType.space:
            break;
        default:
            keycode = 1;
        }
        console.log(eventdata.charCode);
        console.log(eventdata.which);
        console.log(eventdata.keyCode);
        //if a delegate is present call it
        var delegate = delegates[keycode];
        if(delegate !== null){
            delegate(eventdata);
    }
}

Answer 1

When using jQuery to detect keyboard/mouse events, you should always use event.which to get the normalized user input cross-browser.

Slightly off-topic illustrative history, couple months ago I made an userscript in Vanilla JS which runs perfectly fine in FF and Chrome, and just now I had a report that it wasn’t working in Opera. I quickly debugged it on Opera and of course, the event.keyCode was returning 0 when it should be the key’s value.

So yes, whenever you can use jQuery’s event.which to handle user-input, use it to save a lot of headaches.

keydown and keypress are different events and as such may report different values for different events — which may differ further into having a keyCode and/or charCode properties in different browsers. event.which minimizes those discrepancies.