You can access the keyCode and charCode properties of a keyboard event to determine what key was pressed and then trigger other actions. The keyCode property is a numeric value that corresponds to the value of a key on the keyboard. The charCode property is the numeric value of that key in the current character set. (The default character set is UTF-8, which supports ASCII.)

The primary difference between the key code and character values is that a key code value represents a particular key on the keyboard (the 1 on a keypad is different than the 1 in the top row, but the key that generates “1” and the key that generates “!” are the same key) and the character value represents a particular character (the R and r characters are different).

The mappings between keys and their key codes is dependent on the device and the operating system. For this reason, you should not use key mappings to trigger actions. Instead, you should use the predefined constant values provided by the Keyboard class to reference the appropriate keyCode properties. For example, instead of using the key mapping for the Shift key, use the Keyboard.SHIFT constant (as shown in the preceding code sample).