Prevent users from submitting a form by hitting Enter

Question

I have a survey on a website, and there seems to be some issues with the users hitting enter (I don\'t know why) and accidentally submitting the survey (form) without clicki

Answer 1

If you use a script to do the actual submit, then you can add "return false" line to the onsubmit handler like this:

<form onsubmit="return false;">

Calling submit() on the form from JavaScript will not trigger the event.

Answer 2

You could make a JavaScript method to check to see if the Enter key was hit, and if it is, to stop the submit.

<script type="text/javascript">
  function noenter() {
  return !(window.event && window.event.keyCode == 13); }
</script>

Just call that on the submit method.

Answer 3

You can also use javascript:void(0) to prevent form submission.

<form action="javascript:void(0)" method="post">
    <label for="">Search</label>
    <input type="text">
    <button type="sybmit">Submit</button>
</form>

<form action="javascript:void(0)" method="post">
    <label for="">Search</label>
    <input type="text">
    <button type="sybmit">Submit</button>
</form>

Answer 4

Instead of preventing users from pressing Enter, which may seem unnatural, you can leave the form as is and add some extra client-side validation: When the survey is not finished the result is not sent to the server and the user gets a nice message telling what needs to be finished to complete the form. If you are using jQuery, try the Validation plugin:

http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Validation

This will require more work than catching the Enter button, but surely it will provide a richer user experience.

Answer 5

I can't comment yet, so I'll post a new answer

Accepted answer is ok-ish, but it wasn't stopping submit on numpad enter. At least in current version of Chrome. I had to alter the keycode condition to this, then it works.

if(event.keyCode == 13 || event.keyCode == 169) {...}

Answer 6

You can use a method such as

$(document).ready(function() {
  $(window).keydown(function(event){
    if(event.keyCode == 13) {
      event.preventDefault();
      return false;
    }
  });
});

In reading the comments on the original post, to make it more usable and allow people to press Enter if they have completed all the fields:

function validationFunction() {
  $('input').each(function() {
    ...

  }
  if(good) {
    return true;
  }
  return false;
}

$(document).ready(function() {
  $(window).keydown(function(event){
    if( (event.keyCode == 13) && (validationFunction() == false) ) {
      event.preventDefault();
      return false;
    }
  });
});