CORE ATTRIBUTE:  onkeypress
onkeypress="action"
Available in versions: 4.0
HTML 4.0 tag compatibility: All tags except applet, base, basefront, bdo, br, font, frame, frameset, head, html, iframe, isindex, meta, param, script, style, title
 
The onkeypress core attribute is an event handler that is associated with press of a key on the keyboard while the mouse is inside a selected HTML tag (element). In other words, the key press event occurred while the HTML element was in focus. Whenever you press the key, the script code of the onkeypress is executed. This script can also call functions or subroutines which contain code that you want to run when this event occurs. For example, if you only want numbers to be entered, you could capture the value of the key and take appropriate action if a non-numeric key was pressed.
 
The similar onkeydown core attribute is an event handler that is associated with the pressing down of a key, and the onkeyup core attribute is an event handler that is associated with the release up of a key.
 
In this example, place the mouse inside the textarea element and type in a word. Every time you press a key, one line of JavaScript code is executed which causes an alert box to be displayed with a message. Note that the character does not appear in the textarea until after you have clicked okay in the alert.
 
Code:
<textarea onkeypress="javascript: alert('A key was pressed')">
</textarea>
 
Output:

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