Question

I want to retain the conventional ‘form submits when i press Enter’ behavior because users are familiar with. But by reflex, they often hit enter when they finish with a text input box – but before they are actually done with the complete form.

I’d like to hijack the Enter key only when then focus is on a certain class of input.

Looking Related Questions this looks like what I’m looking for:

if (document.addEventListener) {
    document.getElementById('strip').addEventListener('keypress',HandleKeyPress,false);
} else {
    document.getElementById('strip').onkeypress = HandleKeyPress;
}

but the if (document.addEventListener) { part is unfamiliar to me.

Answer 1

You can capture and cancel the enter keypress on those fields like this:

$('.noEnterSubmit').keypress(function(e){
    if ( e.which == 13 ) return false;
    //or...
    if ( e.which == 13 ) e.preventDefault();
});

Then on your inputs just give them a class="noEnterSubmit" 🙂

Looking ahead in case others find this later, in jQuery 1.4.3 (not out yet) you can shorten it to this:

$('.noEnterSubmit').bind('keypress', false);