intercept carriage return in a textarea

Question

How do you catch a carriage-return in a textarea and do a form post instead of a newline in the textarea?

Answer 1

Add an onKeyPress function to the textarea, and have it intercept Enter (character code 13) and submit the form instead.

Here's an example that uses a text input instead of textarea, but it should work the same way.

<textarea name="myTextArea" onKeyPress="checkEnter(event)"></textarea>

Answer 2

The basic skeleton (from the API docs):

$('#textarea-selector-here').keydown(function(event)
{
    switch(event.keyCode)
    {
        // ...
        // different keys do different things
        // Different browsers provide different codes
        // see here for details: http://unixpapa.com/js/key.html    
        // ...
    }
});

However, if you don't want to allow multiline input, why not just use an <input type="text" />?

Answer 3

Capture the keystroke, verify if it is enter, and then look for the parent form element and submit it:

$('#textAreaId').keydown(function (e) {
  var keyCode = e.keyCode || e.which;

  if (keyCode == 13) {
    $(this).parents('form').submit();
    return false;
  }
});

Check the above example here.