TouchEvent: touches property

{{ APIRef("Touch Events") }}

touches is a read-only {{ domxref("TouchList") }} listing all the {{ domxref("Touch") }} objects for touch points that are currently in contact with the touch surface, regardless of whether or not they've changed or what their target element was at {{domxref("Element/touchstart_event", "touchstart")}} time.

You can think of it as how many separate fingers are able to be identified as touching the screen.

[!NOTE] Touches inside the array are not necessarily ordered by order of occurrences (the i-th element in the array being the i-th touch that happened). You cannot assume a specific order. To determine the order of occurrences of the touches, use the touch object IDs.

Value

A {{ domxref("TouchList") }} listing all the {{ domxref("Touch") }} objects for touch points that are still in contact with the touch surface, regardless of whether or not they've changed or what their target element was at touchstart time.

Examples

This example illustrates the {{domxref("TouchEvent")}} object's TouchEvent.touches property. The TouchEvent.touches property is a {{domxref("TouchList")}} object and containing a list of {{domxref("Touch")}} objects for every point of contact currently touching the surface.

In following code snippet, the {{domxref("Element/touchstart_event", "touchstart")}} event handler checks the length of the TouchEvent.touches list to determine the number of touch points that were activated and then invokes different handlers depending on the number of touch points.

someElement.addEventListener("touchstart", (e) => {
  // Invoke the appropriate handler depending on the
  // number of touch points.
  switch (e.touches.length) {
    case 1:
      handle_one_touch(e);
      break;
    case 2:
      handle_two_touches(e);
      break;
    case 3:
      handle_three_touches(e);
      break;
    default:
      console.log("Not supported");
      break;
  }
});

Specifications

{{Specifications}}

Browser compatibility

{{Compat}}