Invoke Escape key press event by jquery

Question

I want to make my question clear. Please dont confuse it with determining the key press. I dont want the user to press any key. On the contrary, I want to run a script which

Answer 1

For security reasons, some browsers (not sure if all), prevent you from firing keydown-events. Please refer to this article for more info.

A quote from the article:

Safari/Chrome makes the keyCode and charCode properties read-only, so it is not possible to simulate specific keys when manually firing events.

Answer 2

You can use $.Event() to create an Event object containing a keydown event with the keyCode of 27 (which should be Esc) like:

var esc = $.Event("keydown", { keyCode: 27 });
$("body").trigger(esc); // change body to the element where you'd like to execute the escape key press.

See this working demo and the docs at jquery.com

Also note that, as stated by Christofer, this might not be working in all browsers and environments as it might be considered shady behavior that could be used in a malicious manner - just like triggering a click event on an <a> with an external href will not happen. I successfully tested this (the Esc) in Chrome, Safari, Opera, FF & IE9 though.