How to submit a form when the return key is pressed?

Question

Can someone please tell me how to submit an HTML form when the return key is pressed and if there are no buttons in the form? The submit button is not there

Answer 1

I believe this is what you want.

//<![CDATA[

//Send form if they hit enter.
document.onkeypress = enter;
function enter(e) {
  if (e.which == 13) { sendform(); }
}

//Form to send
function sendform() {
  document.forms[0].submit();
}
//]]>

Every time a key is pressed, function enter() will be called. If the key pressed matches the enter key (13), then sendform() will be called and the first encountered form will be sent. This is only for Firefox and other standards compliant browsers.

If you find this code useful, please be sure to vote me up!

Answer 2

Why don't you just apply the div submit styles to a submit button? I'm sure there's a javascript for this but that would be easier.

Answer 3

If you are using asp.net you can use the defaultButton attribute on the form.

Answer 4

I tried various javascript/jQuery-based strategies, but I kept having issues. The latest issue to arise involved accidental submission when the user uses the enter key to select from the browser's built-in auto-complete list. I finally switched to this strategy, which seems to work on all the browsers my company supports:

<div class="hidden-submit"><input type="submit" tabindex="-1"/></div>

.hidden-submit {
    border: 0 none;
    height: 0;
    width: 0;
    padding: 0;
    margin: 0;
    overflow: hidden;
}

This is similar to the currently-accepted answer by Chris Marasti-Georg, but by avoiding display: none, it appears to work correctly on all browsers.

Update

I edited the code above to include a negative tabindex so it doesn't capture the tab key. While this technically won't validate in HTML 4, the HTML5 spec includes language to make it work the way most browsers were already implementing it anyway.

Answer 5

Use the following script.

<SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript">
<!--
    function submitenter(myfield,e)
    {
        var keycode;
        if (window.event) keycode = window.event.keyCode;
        else if (e) keycode = e.which;
        else return true;

        if (keycode == 13)
        {
            myfield.form.submit();
            return false;
        }
        else
            return true;
    }
//-->
</SCRIPT>

For each field that should submit the form when the user hits enter, call the submitenter function as follows.

<FORM ACTION="../cgi-bin/formaction.pl">
    name:     <INPUT NAME=realname SIZE=15><BR>
    password: <INPUT NAME=password TYPE=PASSWORD SIZE=10
       onKeyPress="return submitenter(this,event)"><BR>
<INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT VALUE="Submit">
</FORM>

Answer 6

Using the "autofocus" attribute works to give input focus to the button by default. In fact clicking on any control within the form also gives focus to the form, a requirement for the form to react to the RETURN. So, the "autofocus" does that for you in case the user never clicked on any other control within the form.

So, the "autofocus" makes the crucial difference if the user never clicked on any of the form controls before hitting RETURN.

But even then, there are still 2 conditions to be met for this to work without JS:

a) you have to specify a page to go to (if left empty it wont work). In my example it is hello.php

b) the control has to be visible. You could conceivably move it off the page to hide, but you cannot use display:none or visibility:hidden. What I did, was to use inline style to just move it off the page to the left by 200px. I made the height 0px so that it does not take up space. Because otherwise it can still disrupt other controls above and below. Or you could float the element too.

<form action="hello.php" method="get">
  Name: <input type="text" name="name"/><br/>
  Pwd: <input type="password" name="password"/><br/>
  <div class="yourCustomDiv"/>
  <input autofocus type="submit" style="position:relative; left:-200px; height:0px;" />
</form>