SDL 2 text input and Emscripten

SDL 1 used SDL_EnableUNICODE() to enable and disable text input. It started off disabled, and you needed to call SDL_EnableUNICODE() if you depended on the unicode member of SDL_keysym.

SDL 2 has a different text input API which is designed to accommodate international users and touchscreen devices. There, SDL video initialization turns on text input if an on-screen keyboard is not needed. This is normally harmless, but it causes a problem in the Emscripten port. 

Normally, many keys trigger browser actions. Those actions should be prevented if you want to use the same keys in an SDL application. In Firefox, it is possible to prevent browser actions from keypress events, but in Chrome, Safari and IE they need to be prevented in keydown events. However, preventing default actions from keydown events prevents keypress events which are needed to get text characters.

If you need to prevent browser actions and don't need SDL 2 text input, simply disable text input after initializing SDL video:
if (SDL_IsTextInputActive()) SDL_StopTextInput();

You can find more information about these JavaScript events on quirks.org. They also have a test page which you can use to examine their behaviour on different browsers.