Detect all changes to a <input type="text"> (immediately) using JQuery

This jQuery code catches immediate changes to any element, and should work across all browsers:

 $('.myElements').each(function() {
   var elem = $(this);

   // Save current value of element
   elem.data('oldVal', elem.val());

   // Look for changes in the value
   elem.bind("propertychange change click keyup input paste", function(event){
      // If value has changed...
      if (elem.data('oldVal') != elem.val()) {
       // Updated stored value
       elem.data('oldVal', elem.val());

       // Do action
       ....
     }
   });
 });

A real-time fancy solution for jQuery >= 1.9

$("#input-id").on("change keyup paste", function(){
    dosomething();
})

if you also want to detect "click" event, just:

$("#input-id").on("change keyup paste click", function(){
    dosomething();
})

if you're using jQuery <= 1.4, just use live instead of on.

Unfortunately, I think setInterval wins the prize:

<input type=text id=input_id />
<script>
setInterval(function() { ObserveInputValue($('#input_id').val()); }, 100);
</script>

It's the cleanest solution, at only 1 line of code. It's also the most robust, since you don't have to worry about all the different events/ways an input can get a value.

The downsides of using 'setInterval' don't seem to apply in this case:

• The 100ms latency? For many applications, 100ms is fast enough.
• Added load on the browser? In general, adding lots of heavy-weight setIntervals on your page is bad. But in this particular case, the added page load is undetectable.
• It doesn't scale to many inputs? Most pages don't have more than a handful of inputs, which you can sniff all in the same setInterval.

Binding to the oninput event seems to work fine in most sane browsers. IE9 supports it too, but the implementation is buggy (the event is not fired when deleting characters).

With jQuery version 1.7+ the on method is useful to bind to the event like this:

$(".inputElement").on("input", null, null, callbackFunction);

2017 answer: the input event does exactly this for anything more recent than IE8.

$(el).on('input', callback)