Note: as the keypress event isn't covered by any official specification, the actual behavior encountered when using it may differ across browsers, browser versions, and platforms.

This method is a shortcut for .bind("keypress", handler) in the first two variations, and .trigger("keypress") in the third.

The keypress event is sent to an element when the browser registers keyboard input. This is similar to the keydown event, except in the case of key repeats. If the user presses and holds a key, a keydown event is triggered once, but separate keypress events are triggered for each inserted character. In addition, modifier keys (such as Shift) trigger keydown events but not keypress events.

A keypress event handler can be attached to any element, but the event is only sent to the element that has the focus. Focusable elements can vary between browsers, but form elements can always get focus so are reasonable candidates for this event type.

For example, consider the HTML:

<form>
  <fieldset>
    <input id="target" type="text" value="Hello there" />
  </fieldset>
</form>
<div id="other">
  Trigger the handler
</div>

The event handler can be bound to the input field:

$("#target").keypress(function() {
  alert("Handler for .keypress() called.");
});

Now when the insertion point is inside the field, pressing a key displays the alert:

Handler for .keypress() called.

The message repeats if the key is held down. To trigger the event manually, apply .keypress() without an argument::

$('#other').click(function() {
  $("#target").keypress();
});

After this code executes, clicks on Trigger the handler will also alert the message.

If key presses anywhere need to be caught (for example, to implement global shortcut keys on a page), it is useful to attach this behavior to the document object. Because of event bubbling, all key presses will make their way up the DOM to the document object unless explicitly stopped.

To determine which character was entered, examine the event object that is passed to the handler function. While browsers use differing properties to store this information, jQuery normalizes the .which property so you can reliably use it to retrieve the character code.

Note that keydown and keyup provide a code indicating which key is pressed, while keypress indicates which character was entered. For example, a lowercase "a" will be reported as 65 by keydown and keyup, but as 97 by keypress. An uppercase "A" is reported as 65 by all events. Because of this distinction, when catching special keystrokes such as arrow keys, .keydown() or .keyup() is a better choice.