ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
Keyboard input
tf.border = true;
tf.type = "input";
tf.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN,reportKeyDown);
tf.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_UP,reportKeyUp);
function reportKeyDown(event:KeyboardEvent):void
{
trace("Key Pressed: " + String.fromCharCode(event.charCode) + " (key code: " +
event.keyCode + " character code: " + event.charCode + ")");
if (event.keyCode == Keyboard.SHIFT) tf.borderColor = 0xFF0000;
}
function reportKeyUp(event:KeyboardEvent):void
{
trace("Key Released: " + String.fromCharCode(event.charCode) + " (key code: " +
event.keyCode + " character code: " + event.charCode + ")");
if (event.keyCode == Keyboard.SHIFT)
{
tf.borderColor = 0x000000;
}
}
The TextField class also reports a textInput event that you can listen for when a user enters text. For more
information, see “Capturing text input” on page 378.
Note: In the AIR runtime, a keyboard event can be canceled. In the Flash Player runtime, a keyboard event cannot be
canceled.
Key codes and character codes
Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
You can access the keyCode and charCode properties of a keyboard event to determine what key was pressed and then
trigger other actions. The keyCode property is a numeric value that corresponds to the value of a key on the keyboard.
The charCode property is the numeric value of that key in the current character set. (The default character set is UTF-
8, which supports ASCII.)
The primary difference between the key code and character values is that a key code value represents a particular key
on the keyboard (the 1 on a keypad is different than the 1 in the top row, but the key that generates “1” and the key
that generates “!” are the same key) and the character value represents a particular character (the R and r characters
are different).
Note: For the mappings between keys and their character code values in ASCII, see the flash.ui.Keyboard class in the
ActionScript 3.0 Reference for the Adobe Flash Platform.
The mappings between keys and their key codes is dependent on the device and the operating system. For this reason,
you should not use key mappings to trigger actions. Instead, you should use the predefined constant values provided
by the Keyboard class to reference the appropriate keyCode properties. For example, instead of using the key mapping
for the Shift key, use the Keyboard.SHIFT constant (as shown in the preceding code sample).
Last updated 6/6/2012
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