jQuery textbox change event doesn't fire until textbox loses focus?

Question

I found that jQuery change event on a textbox doesn't fire until I click outside the textbox.

HTML:

<input type="text" id="textbox" />

JS:

$("#textbox").change(function() {alert("Change detected!");});

See demo on JSFiddle

My application requires the event to be fired on every character change in the textbox. I even tried using keyup instead...

$("#textbox").keyup(function() {alert("Keyup detected!");});

...but it's a known fact that the keyup event isn't fired on right-click-and-paste.

Any workaround? Is having both listeners going to cause any problems?

Answer 1

Binding to both events is the typical way to do it. You can also bind to the paste event.

You can bind to multiple events like this:

$("#textbox").on('change keyup paste', function() {
    console.log('I am pretty sure the text box changed');
});

If you wanted to be pedantic about it, you should also bind to mouseup to cater for dragging text around, and add a lastValue variable to ensure that the text actually did change:

var lastValue = '';
$("#textbox").on('change keyup paste mouseup', function() {
    if ($(this).val() != lastValue) {
        lastValue = $(this).val();
        console.log('The text box really changed this time');
    }
});

And if you want to be super duper pedantic then you should use an interval timer to cater for auto fill, plugins, etc:

var lastValue = '';
setInterval(function() {
    if ($("#textbox").val() != lastValue) {
        lastValue = $("#textbox").val();
        console.log('I am definitely sure the text box realy realy changed this time');
    }
}, 500);