Note: The answer below was written in 2010. Here many years later, both keyCode
and which
are deprecated in favor of key
(for the logical key) and code
(for the physical placement of the key). But note that IE doesn’t support code
, and its support for key
is based on an older version of the spec so isn’t quite correct. As I write this, the current Edge based on EdgeHTML and Chakra doesn’t support code
either, but Microsoft is rolling out its Blink– and V8– based replacement for Edge, which presumably does/will.
Some browsers use keyCode
, others use which
.
If you’re using jQuery, you can reliably use which
as jQuery standardizes things; More here.
If you’re not using jQuery, you can do this:
var key = 'which' in e ? e.which : e.keyCode;
Or alternatively:
var key = e.which || e.keyCode || 0;
…which handles the possibility that e.which
might be 0
(by restoring that 0
at the end, using JavaScript’s curiously-powerful ||
operator).