Event: defaultPrevented property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

Note: This feature is available in Web Workers.

The defaultPrevented read-only property of the Event interface returns a boolean value indicating whether or not the call to Event.preventDefault() canceled the event.

Value

A boolean value, where true indicates that the default user agent action was prevented, and false indicates that it was not.

Example

This example logs attempts to visit links from two <a> elements. JavaScript is used to prevent the second link from working.

HTML

html

<p><a id="link1" href="#link1">Visit link 1</a></p>
<p><a id="link2" href="#link2">Try to visit link 2</a> (you can't)</p>
<p id="log"></p>

JavaScript

function stopLink(event) {
  event.preventDefault();
}

function logClick(event) {
  const log = document.getElementById("log");

  if (event.target.tagName === "A") {
    log.innerText = event.defaultPrevented
      ? `Sorry, but you cannot visit this link!\n${log.innerText}`
      : `Visiting link…\n${log.innerText}`;
  }
}

const a = document.getElementById("link2");
a.addEventListener("click", stopLink);
document.addEventListener("click", logClick);

Result

Specifications

Specification
DOM Standard # ref-for-dom-event-defaultprevented①

Browser compatibility

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