In todays web world, forms and input bars are very important. We all use searching and filtering in our applications. The easiest and obvious way to do this while using JS(jquery) is binding key events to the search bar.
The event I usually bound was ‘keypress’. This is fine and works good. But the actual meaning of keypress , in its original form in IE world (!!!!!) is the event which actually adds some value in the input field. Some keys like backspace, delete, clt etc do not add any value and hence are not detected by keypress event.
These are important keys as often in filtering when the input field is empty, we might want to show all results. The user might type some query and delete it and hence detection of such keys is important.
To avoid such confusion, one should always use keydown or keyup events. These events detect events where any key is pressed and one can use e.which to determine what key is pressed and perform action.
I personally like keyup becuase keydown event is called just after pressing the key and hence value of input field lags one character behind the actual input.
Hope it helps !
Rushabh Ajay Hathi 