Document that the Enter key causes the “keypress” event to fire

[sideshowbarker]

This change updates the page for the keypress event to match actual behavior in browsers — by changing the page to state that the event fires when the Enter key is pressed — not only when a key that produces a character value is pressed.

• Declare keypress event should be fired when pressing Enter, Shift + Enter and Ctrl + Enter w3c/uievents#183 (comment)
• Redefine when keypress event should be fired w3c/uievents#266 (comment)
• Fire keypress event for Enter, Shift+Enter, and Ctrl+Enter keys w3c/uievents#392

Otherwise, without this change, the information on the keypress page incorrectly doesn’t match actual browser behavior — in that the page states that the keypress event fires only when a key that produces a character value are pressed, while in fact browsers also fire the event when the Enter key is pressed.

[github-actions]

Preview URLs

• /en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/keypress_event

External URLs (1)

URL: /en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/keypress_event
Title: Element: keypress event

• https://w3c.github.io/uievents/ (1 time) (Note! This may be a new URL 👀)

(comment last updated: 2025-01-30 07:33:55)

[Josh-Cena]

Wait, but doesn't Enter also produce a printable character, i.e. the line break character? Is that not always the case?

[sideshowbarker]

Wait, but doesn't Enter also produce a printable character, i.e. the line break character?

Good point — the existing “key that produces a character value” language doesn’t actually have any clear and precise technical meaning. It’s ambiguous and misleading and unhelpful and we never should have been using it to begin with.

What the spec actually normatively defines it as is, “belonging to the set of valid Unicode character categories”, where Unicode character categories is this:

the Letter (Ll, Lm, Lo, Lt, Lu), Number (Nd, Nl, No), Punctuation (Pc, Pd, Pe, Pf, Pi, Po, Ps) and Symbol (Sc, Sk, Sm, So) category values

So, I’ve amended the commit to excise the “key that produces a character value” language and instead — to match the actual normative spec requirements — explicitly and precisely just say, “a letter, number, punctuation, or symbol key”.

[Josh-Cena]

Thanks! It's actually fine if you refer to those Unicode character categories explicitly, and link to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Regular_expressions/Unicode_character_class_escape. Makes the definition even less ambiguous.

[Josh-Cena]

LGTM, thanks