The problem isn't detecting a page closing down. The problem is to capture an Input field's content when something external happens before the user enters Return. But after playing around with it more, at this jsfiddle - http://jsfiddle.net/stevea/bT54M/3/ - it turns out that there really is no problem. If you're in the middle of entering text into an Input field and you do something external, like hitting the Get Input button in the jsfiddle above, the change event for the Input is triggered automatically and this.value
is what you've entered so far. So the bottom line is that you don't need to hit Return when you're done. Just about anything you do outside of the Input (probably anything that blurs the Input focus) triggers the Input change event.
$(function() {
$('input#fname').change(function(e) {
debugger;
$('div#firstName').append(this.value);
});
$('#getInput').click(function() {
debugger;
$('div#firstName').append(this.value);
});
});