KeyboardEvent.key not working on certain Android devices

[ajmas]

While testing for issue #84 on Android I ran into an issue, whereby the KeyBoardEvent.key was producing undefined, causing issues with matching against delimiterChars. At the same time the default delimiters aren't useable on phone keyboard, due to lack of tab key and enter not being available, other than when suggested tags are shown.

When connected to a computer, for debugging the view in Chrome on the computer does provide event.key values on the phone, but not when typing from the phone's keyboard.

A limitation with event.keyCode, if we used that as fallback, is that 'A', 'a' and '@' all provide the same value, when using the US English layout.

I tried using keyboardevent-key-polyfill, but that didn't prove of use since 'event.key' is technically supported, but not receiving the right values from the on-screen keyboard.

My initial tests were with an LG Stylo 2, running Android 7 and Chrome 60, though I did test with two other Android phones and got the same behaviour.

Note, that I did not experience any issue when testing with iOS.

Edit: Have opened a ticket against Chromium, to see if this could confirm a device bug or provide a lead to the issue cause:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=763559

Update: per the response on the referenced ticket we should look into using oninput or onchange instead, since the limitation encountered is apparently due to the behaviour of the 'soft keyboards'.

Update: oninput won't provide us the values of non-printing characters. onchange only gives us the the new state. The ticket was marked as "Won't fix" which is a little disconcerting, since they have essentially broken onKeyDown when it comes to non-deprecated values.

[i-like-robots]

Thanks for all your efforts looking into this @ajmas, what a nightmare it all is!

I think using onInput or onChange sounds sensible, this should give us a character-by-character update whether using React or Preact.

This may be made easier via #96.

[i-like-robots]

I've release 6.0.0-beta.3 which includes the solution implemented and tested in #181. I'm going to close this issue now as (hopefully) fixed.