Thread: Emulate an '@' keypress or any other char

Originally Posted by tabstop

@ would, I would guess, involve shift+2.

I doubt that, because that is only the layout of the US keyboard.

on windows there is application Character Set that gives a possibility to exemine the codes of different characters in different encoding tables

VkKeyScan will tell you the VK for a specified character. Here's a quick demo of it since MSDN doesn't seem to have one which shows where the at key is on standard UK, US, and Dutch keyboards.

Code:

#include <iostream>
#include <cstdio>
#include <windows.h>

void PrintKeyInfo(WCHAR key, USHORT vk, USHORT shift, LPCWSTR layout)
{
    // figure out the scancode for the key
    BYTE scanCode = static_cast<BYTE>(MapVirtualKeyW(vk, MAPVK_VK_TO_VSC));
    // put it in the bit positions specified by the docs
    LONG keyParam = scanCode << 16;
    // display data
    WCHAR keyName[10] = {0};
    GetKeyNameTextW(keyParam, keyName, ARRAYSIZE(keyName));
    std::wcout << L"In keyboard layout "
        << layout << L", '" << key << L"' is at VK 0x"
        << std::hex << vk << L" (" << keyName << L") "
        L"and you ";
    if(!shift)
    {
        std::wcout << L"don't ";
    }
    std::wcout << L"need to hold shift to get at it\n";
}

void PrintKeyInfoForLang(WCHAR key, LANGID lang)
{
    // save the current key layout
    HKL currentKeyLayout = GetKeyboardLayout(GetCurrentThreadId());
    WCHAR layoutName[10];
    // create the layout name
    swprintf(layoutName, L"0000%04x", lang);
    // load the layout
    HKL keyLayout = LoadKeyboardLayoutW(layoutName, KLF_ACTIVATE | KLF_NOTELLSHELL);
    if(keyLayout)
    {
        // get key details
        SHORT keyDetails = VkKeyScanExW(key, keyLayout);
        USHORT vkValue = LOBYTE(keyDetails); // the Virtual Key 
        USHORT shiftState = HIBYTE(keyDetails); // the shift state
        PrintKeyInfo(key, vkValue, shiftState, layoutName);
        ActivateKeyboardLayout(currentKeyLayout, 0);
        UnloadKeyboardLayout(keyLayout);
    }
    else
    {
        std::cout << "Couldn't load keyboard layout\n";
    }
}

int main()
{
    WCHAR at = WCHAR(0x40);  // 0x40 is @ in UTF-8/UTF-16
    
    PrintKeyInfoForLang(at, MAKELANGID(LANG_ENGLISH, SUBLANG_ENGLISH_UK));
    PrintKeyInfoForLang(at, MAKELANGID(LANG_ENGLISH, SUBLANG_ENGLISH_US));
    PrintKeyInfoForLang(at, MAKELANGID(LANG_DUTCH, SUBLANG_DUTCH));

    return 0;
}

Which gives me

In keyboard layout 00000809, '@' is at VK 0xc0 (') and you need to hold shift to get at it
In keyboard layout 00000409, '@' is at VK 0x32 (2) and you need to hold shift to get at it
In keyboard layout 00000413, '@' is at VK 0xde (@) and you don't need to hold shift to get at it