Danny Goodman - JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook

Keyboard events in recent browsers provide information about the keys and, where applicable, about the characters corresponding to the keys. Character values may be read from the keypress event. The following table reveals the codes for characters in the lower ASCII character set. Some of these codes are for action keys (such as Back-space and Tab), whose character values are also in this range.

Key codes are numeric values that correspond to physical keys on the keyboard but do not necessarily correspond to a particular character. For example, the A key on the keyboard produces the same key code when pressed, even though its character code might be 65 (uppercase A)or 97 (lowercase a), depending on whether the Shift key is down at the same time. Key codes are not influenced by modifier keys. Character values (see Appendix A) may be read from the keypress event, while the key values, including navigation and function keys, are available from keydown and keyup events. The following table lists all keys on a typical U.S. English keyboard and their corresponding key codes.

All of the words in the following table are reserved for use by the ECMAScript interpreter built into scriptable browsers. You may not use these words as identifiers for variables, functions, or objects. A majority of these words are already used by current implementations of JavaScript, while others may become part of the vocabulary