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Getting the target

The object at the center of an event is called the

target

. Suppose that you assigned an

onclick

event han-

dler to a

<div/>

element. When the

click

events fires, the

<div/>

element is considered the target.

In IE, the target is contained in the

srcElement

property of the

event

object:

var oTarget = oEvent.srcElement;

In DOM-compliant browsers, the target is contained in the

target

property:

var oTarget = oEvent.target;

Getting the character code

Earlier you saw that both IE and the DOM support an

event

object property called

keyCode

, which

returns a numeric code for the key that was pressed. If the key represents a character (unlike Shift, Ctrl,

and so on), IE’s

keyCode

property returns the character code of the character (which is its Unicode

equivalent):

var iCharCode = oEvent.keyCode;

In DOM-compliant browsers, a separation occurs between the code of the key that was pressed and the

character code. To get the character code, use the

charCode

property:

var iCharCode = oEvent.charCode;

You can then use this value to get the actual character by passing it to the

String.fromCharCode()

method:

var sChar = String.fromCharCode(oEvent.charCode);

If you are unsure as to whether the key that was pressed contains a character, you can use the

isChar

property:

if (oEvent.isChar) {

var iCharCode = oEvent.charCode;

}

IE targets can only be elements,

document

, or

window

; DOM-compliant browsers

also allow text nodes to be targets.

IE on Macintosh also supports both the

srcElement

and

target

attributes.

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All about Events

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