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Handling forms in JavaScript

Discover the basics of working with forms in HTML and JavaScript

Forms are an extremely important part of HTML and the Web Platform. They allow users can interact with the page and

and much much more.

By default, forms submit their content to a server-side endpoint, which by default is the page URL itself:

<form>
  ...
  <input type="submit" />
</form>

We can override this behavior by setting the action attribute of the form element, using the HTML method defined by the method attribute, which defaults to GET:

<form action="/contact" method="POST">
  ...
  <input type="submit" />
</form>

Upon clicking the submit input element, the browser makes a POST request to the /contact URL on the same origin (protocol, domain and port).

Using JavaScript we can intercept this event, submit the form asynchronously (with XHR and Fetch), and we can also react to events happening on individual form elements.

Intercepting a form submit event

I just described the default behavior of forms, without JavaScript.

In order to start working with forms with JavaScript you need to intercept the submit event on the form element:

const form = document.querySelector('form')
form.addEventListener('submit', (event) => {
  // submit event detected
})

Now inside the submit event handler function we call the event.preventDefault() method to prevent the default behavior and avoid a form submit to reload the page:

const form = document.querySelector('form')
form.addEventListener('submit', (event) => {
  // submit event detected
  event.preventDefault()
})

At this point clicking the submit event button in the form will not do anything, except giving us the control.

Working with input element events

We have a number of events we can listen for in form elements

Here’s a sample form demo on Codepen: https://codepen.io/flaviocopes/pen/zQrqNy/

→ Read my DOM Tutorial on The Valley of Code
→ Read my Browser Events Tutorial on The Valley of Code
→ Read my Browser APIs Tutorials on The Valley of Code
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