I want to create an input box that allows to type only a distinct alphabet letter in the input box ( No duplicate alphabet value, ONLY ONE)
I looked up all the attributes for input box but I couldn't find one and there were no example.
Do I have to handle it within JavaScript functions? (I am using React)
<input
className="App-Contain-Input"
name="containedLetter"
type={"text"}
onChange={containedChange}
/>
Here is how this can be done, note that we have to use onkeydown which fires when a key is being pressed, but not before it is being released (this way we can intercept and prevent the key stroke from being taken into account):
function MyInput() {
const containedChange = (event) => {
if (event.key.length === 1 && event.code.startsWith('Key') && event.code.length === 4 && event.target.value.indexOf(event.key) !== -1) {
event.preventDefault()
return false;
}
return true
}
return (
<input
id="input"
className="App-Contain-Input"
name="containedLetter"
type="text"
onkeydown={containedChange}
/>
}
A way to do it with a cheeky two-liner is to get rid of any non-letters with regex, then let Set do the de-duping by converting to Array => Set => Array => String:
As a side note, many of the other solutions posted here make one or both of two assumptions:
In general, it's best to be completely agnostic as to how the value is going to arrive to the input, and simply deal with the value after it has arrived.
import { useState } from 'react';
export default function Home() {
const [value, setValue] = useState('');
return (
<div>
<input
type='text'
value={value}
onChange={(e) => {
const onlyLetters = e.target.value.replace(/[^a-zA-Z]/g, '');
setValue(Array.from(new Set(onlyLetters.split(''))).join(''));
}}
/>
</div>
);
}
One pure js solution would be to handle the input value in onkeyup event where we have access to the latest key as well as updated input target value.
If the latest key pressed is duplicate then we will found it on 2 location in the target value, first on some where middle of the target value and second at the end of the target value. So we can remove the value at the end (which is the duplicate one).
The below code snippet shows the implementation of above in React
const Input = () => {
const handleKeyUp = (e) => {
const { key, target: { value }} = e;
const len = value.length;
if (value.indexOf(key) < len - 2) {
e.target.value = value.slice(0, len - 1);
}
}
return (
<div>
<label>Unique Keywords</label>
<input type="text" placeholder="my-input" onKeyUp={handleKeyUp} />
</div>
);
}