AS3 – Detecting Control, Shift and Alt keyboard shortcuts

Here is a snippet of code which allows you to detect keyboard shortcuts such as ctrl+[another key] and ctrl+shift+[another key]. I wasn’t able to find any decent examples of detecting shortcuts but after reading the AS3 documentation I found that the Keyboard event contains the following boolean properties

ctrlKey
shiftKey
altKey

So by simply checking if those properties a true you can fire code after a combination was pressed.

The following detects ctrl+p:

stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_UP, onKeyBoardUp);

function onKeyBoardUp(e:KeyboardEvent):void
{
  if ( e.ctrlKey ) //if control key is down
  {
    switch ( e.keyCode )
    {
     case Keyboard.P : //if control+p
      //do something
      break;
    }
  }
}

You can also detect ctrl+[another key] and ctrl+shift+[another key] at the same time by using:

function onKeyBoardUp(e:KeyboardEvent):void
{
  if ( e.ctrlKey ) //if control key is down
  {
    if ( e.shiftKey ) //if shift key is also down
    {
      switch ( e.keyCode )
      {
        case Keyboard.U : //if control+shift+u
        //do something
        break;
      }
    }
    else //otherwise do normal control shortcut
    {
      switch ( e.keyCode )
      {
        case Keyboard.P : //if control+p
        //do something
        break;
      }
    }
  }
}