Question

How do you get the VK code from a char that is a letter? It seems like you should be able to do something like javax.swing.KeyStroke.getKeyStroke('c').getKeyCode(), but that doesn’t work (the result is zero). Everyone knows how to get the key code if you already have a KeyEvent, but what if you just want to turn chars into VK ints? I’m not interested in getting the FK code for strange characters, only [A-Z],[a-z],[0-9].

Context of this problem ——– All of the Robot tutorials I’ve seen assume programmers love to spell out words by sending keypresses with VK codes:

int keyInput[] = {       KeyEvent.VK_D,       KeyEvent.VK_O,       KeyEvent.VK_N,       KeyEvent.VK_E   };//end keyInput array 

Call me lazy, but even with Eclipse this is no way to go about using TDD on GUIs. If anyone happens to know of a Robot-like class that takes strings and then simulates user input for those strings (I’m using FEST), I’d love to know.

Answer 1

Maybe this ugly hack:

Map<String, Integer> keyTextToCode = new HashMap<String, Integer>(256); Field[] fields = KeyEvent.class.getDeclaredFields(); for (Field field : fields) {     String name = field.getName();     if (name.startsWith('VK_')) {         keyTextToCode.put(name.substring('VK_'.length()).toUpperCase(),                           field.getInt(null));     } } 

keyTextToCode would then contain the mapping from strings (e.g. ‘A’ or ‘PAGE_UP’) to vk codes.