Building a keyboard and missing onclick event

June 29, 2022

I’m building a virtual keyboard with vanillla javascript but don’t know where to add the onclick event listener to the buttons or how to grab them. I have a printKeys function that loops thru the array and prints them onload, and I have an unfinished typeKeys function where I’m trying to grab the innerhtml and print it to the input field.

HTML

</head>          
<body onload="printKeys()">
        <div class="text">
          <input type="text" class="your-text" id="input" placeholder="Your text here.."></input>
    
          <button class="copy-btn">Copy</button>
        </div>
        <div class="keyboard" id="keyboard"></div>
    
        <script src="index.js"></script>
      </body>
    </html>

Javascript

    const alphaKeys = ["a","b","c"];
    const numKeys = "1234567890";
    const keyboard = document.getElementById("keyboard");
    
    // render keyboard
    function printKeys() {
      for (let i = 0; i < alphaKeys.length; i++) {
        let keys = document.createElement("button");
        keys.innerHTML = alphaKeys[i];
        //add onclick function to button
        keyboard.appendChild(keys);
      }
    }
    
    //onClick event, add text in text field
    const input = document.getElementById('input')
    
    function typeKeys() {
      console.log("clicked")
      //grab input and replace with button innerhtml
    }

>Solution :

Instead of adding the event handler to each button, you can apply it to the parent (keyboard) then just use the event’s target to get the specific button. I also added the character to a data-attribute instead of the innerHTML.

const alphaKeys = ["a","b","c"];
    const numKeys = "1234567890";
    const keyboard = document.querySelector(".keyboard");
    
    // render keyboard
    function printKeys() {
      for (let i = 0; i < alphaKeys.length; i++) {
        let keys = document.createElement("button");
        keys.innerHTML = alphaKeys[i];
        keys.setAttribute("data-character",alphaKeys[i]);
        keyboard.appendChild(keys);
      }
    }
    
    //onClick event, add text in text field
    const input = document.getElementById('input')
    
    function typeKeys(character) {
        input.value += character;
    }

keyboard.addEventListener("click",function(e){
  let target = e.target;
  if(target.getAttribute("data-character")){
     typeKeys(target.getAttribute("data-character"))
  }
});

printKeys();

<div class="text">
          <input type="text" class="your-text" id="input" placeholder="Your text here..">
          <button class="copy-btn">Copy</button>
        </div>
        <div class="keyboard" id="keyboard"></div>