ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

Chapter 30: Keyboard input
Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
Your application can capture and respond to keyboard input and can manipulate an IME to let users type non-ASCII
text characters in multibyte languages. Note that this section assumes that you are already familiar with the
ActionScript 3.0 event model. For more information, see “Handling events” on page 125.
For information on discovering what kind of keyboard support is available (such as physical, virtual, alphanumeric, or
12-button numeric) during runtime, see “Discovering input types” on page 557.
An Input Method Editor (IME) allows users to type complex characters and symbols using a standard keyboard. You
can use the IME classes to enable users to take advantage of their system IME in your applications.
More Help topics
flash.events.KeyboardEvent
flash.system.IME
Capturing keyboard input
Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
Display objects that inherit their interaction model from the InteractiveObject class can respond to keyboard events
by using event listeners. For example, you can place an event listener on the Stage to listen for and respond to keyboard
input. In the following code, an event listener captures a key press, and the key name and key code properties are
displayed:
function reportKeyDown(event:KeyboardEvent):void
{
trace("Key Pressed: " + String.fromCharCode(event.charCode) + " (character code: " +
event.charCode + ")");
}
stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, reportKeyDown);
Some keys, such as the Ctrl key, generate events even though they have no glyph representation.
In the previous code example, the keyboard event listener captured keyboard input for the entire Stage. You can also
write an event listener for a specific display object on the Stage; this event listener is triggered when the object has the
focus.
In the following example, keystrokes are reflected in the Output panel only when the user types inside the TextField
instance. Holding the Shift key down temporarily changes the border color of the TextField to red.
This code assumes there is a TextField instance named tf on the Stage.
Last updated 6/6/2012
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